Big whorls have little whorls that feed on their velocity,

And little whorls have lesser whorls and so on to viscosity.

Weather. How many times in our lives have we truly wondered about the clouds,
the rain, the snow, or wind? I am not talking about simply admiring the beauty of a
sunset or cursing a blizzard in winter, but stopping in front of natures spectacle, clearing
the mind of everyday concerns and asking ourselves: How do those clouds take and hold
their shapes? How do raindrops and snowflakes form? How is it that air, which when
still is nothing that can be seen or felt, bends trees and moves ships across the sea?
Yet what aspect of our world affects us more in ways both beneficial and
catastrophic than the weather? What is more glorious than the first warm day of spring, a
snowfall on Christmas Eve? What offers us more wealth than healthy rains? What is
more devastating than a cyclone or flood? Weather affects our travels. It can alter the
outcome of a battle. It can raise prices, it can starve thousands. It can devastate entire
cities within hours. And yet why, with so much power at its command, is weather so often
sparing, kind and giving? Blow, blow, thou winter wind/Thou art not so unkind/As man's
ingratitude.
The fact is, aside from the casual words of poets and despite its ability to
influence each aspect of our lives, our relationship with weather is not one that brings on
deep contemplation of its origins or nature. I say we venerate the weather because in

mystery and capriciousness it is indeed all that we are. When we seek ways to describe
ourselves, particularly our innermost states, consider the expressions we choose. We seek
shelter from our dark and brooding moods and despair can leave us in a fog, while we
savor the breeziness of joy. We cower from storms of anger, compliments rain down upon
us, a sudden realization strikes us like lightning. Consciousness flows like a stream,
emotions in rivers, rage is a fury. We may suddenly be flooded with memories, doubt can
cast a cloud across our face, thoughts evaporate, we are drenched and can even drown in
our sorrows. What of the winds of political change that blow through our nations, the
maelstrom of fear that swirls through the crowds, the undercurrents that divide and
torment our souls? And while we may despair the clouds of melancholy or suffer the
tempest that can be love, we will eventually, finally drift off to sleep.
All of this is to say that as humans we are shaped by the unknown, inside and out.
We cant predict the weather any better than we can understand our minds or foretell our
own destinies. Perhaps we didnt just borrow these climatic terms to describe our mind
and soul, perhaps in many ways we are weather; in us as in the atmosphere the same
elements are to be found, the same patterns and possibilities, the same chaotic rhythms.
So I say, maybe long ago, perhaps when language was more closely woven with
the objects of our world, when our understanding of ourselves was manifest in the things
around us before it was shaped by the words from our mouths, we accepted in some way
or fashion that the human mind with its capricious faculties of love, desire and anger, was
not similar to but was as the weather is, both sharing a language, both coupled by
meaning, both drawn upon the same signs and patterns. And so to know man, to know

truth and so to know love, is to know the coming weather, which is at best to place a bet,
to tender a guess based on hope.
Which is to say perhaps man and weather are similarly to be admired, cursed and
worshipped but never truly known.

* * *

And so I set out this morning, walking with a barometric low moving into
position in the atmosphere above me. The isotherms and isotheres were holding strong.
The air temperature was in a lesser relationship to the mean annual. The evaporated
water in the air was at its lowest elasticity, air humidity at saturation.
In other words, it was cold and just beginning to rain as I walked through Ks
most crowded and neglected quarter, a place I had not visited in years. For decades, this
quarter had thrived as a slum populated largely by Jews and Russian emigrants and
history continued to define this place despite efforts to update its structure and
appearance. In the buildings that had not been demolished or defaced, there remained a
hint of charm in the weathered woodwork, the bonds and courses of brick which were
laid back then with more care than now, the elegant window panes that appeared to be
sagging with old age, refracting light in shimmers of color, the iron fences and railings
with the beautiful imperfections twisted into each by hand. Yet, as with all places of
human habitation, there was a dark corner to every lively sidewalk, for every well-tended
courtyard there was a forbidden alley, a desperate chamber, a dank and forgotten place
where it was best never to set foot. Labyrinthine and loathsome, those places were here in
this quarter of K as well.
Over the last few decades, this part of the city had been razed and redeveloped,
repopulated and fumigated; yet despite these many efforts at renewal, over time the drab
colors of old would seep back into the freshly painted facades and store signs; butcher

shops would give way to gin palaces; the door to a bright and sweet smelling pastry shop
would one day open into the dark and pungent clutter of a pawn store; an ephemeral
orderliness in the streets would vanish under the more familiar congestion of
costermongers and horse pulled carriages; kids would emerge from alleyways and cracks
between buildings, dashing about like things loosened by the wind; the phlegmatic
ghosts of old men and women would take shape and stir beneath tattered layers of rug
and cloth; rats and dogs would evolve from the muck, would collect again and breed
again; the noise would return again; the reek swell and violate all again; the slime and
mud gather underfoot again. All the old patterns of life would eventually settle back in
again, as if destined by some natural force to forever return and prosper here, and thereby
define this part of K.
For years I had faithfully avoided this part of town, and if I ever was to choose to
come here it certainly would not be to struggle beneath this cold drizzle, the beginnings
of a storm which brought to the horrid street surfaces additional abominations, visual and
odoriferous. But it wasnt the dark buildings, the abundant filth and decay that had kept
me away. No. It wasnt the garbage on the sidewalks, the trash bursting from the
otherwise empty doorways, the overpowering odors of excrement and rotted waste, the
broken down carts, the dead animals discarded without a care. No. And it wasnt the
abject forms of the living that dwelt here like so many insects: children skittering about
like ants, old women like dungbeetles rolling down the streets with their overwhelming
bundles of rags, men knocked to the ground by drink, struggling like horseflies to gain
some upright purchase. And no, it wasnt the thieves or addicts you suspected behind
every skulking manshape, it wasnt the families that crept on all fours to and from empty

hovels like so many vermin, not even the slatternly ladies with painted beaks and milkgorged breasts who pulled at my sleeves and squawked their prices in some
unrecognizable, inhuman tongue. No, none of this decay and human misery bothered me,
this was a milieu where I felt quite at home, at ease even. This was where I had met my
wife after all, literally and not all that long ago. And it was solely and completely for her
sake that I had resisted visiting these familiar and tempting haunts.
Yet not too many years ago pass me a few libations to pry away the days fatigue
and accumulated sorrows from my mind and voila! a vigorous patina miraculously
appeared across this most dreadful scene. The blue gas flumes of the public houses
scintillated a million times over in abundant tin, polished brass, mirrors, and leaded glass.
Id buddy up to the medical experts with their boyish eyes and potion cases strapped
around their waists and guzzle down their remedies for fatigue, rheumatics and sexual
revitalization! Each of the whores I suddenly knew by name, and the drunks that I had
cussed during the day were transformed into pals with whom I guffawed, shared slaps on
the back and spit-flecked rounds of filthy repartee! Just the sight of the gaudy posters
and marquees in front of the theaters boasting The Lovely! The Talented! was enough for
me to burst spontaneously into song! As if opening its doors to a sin strewn paradise, the
streets would fill with flywalkers, jugglers, plate spinners, acrobats creating their human
pyramids and the strongmen who bent iron on their thighs and broke wooden studs across
their pates. Laughter was everywhere, even the most broken people jigged, the saddest
women sang, rickety children pranced about without a care.
Then at the stroke of midnight the omnibuses would appear like great ships out of
the fog, their yellow headlights set into the face of a leviathan, and we would smear some

additional filth upon our cheeks and chin, bow and tip our hats to the men and women
safely atop the upper deck dressed in fine overcoats and gowns, the streetlamps casting
halos around their heads as they leaned across the railings with their opera glasses in
hand to see up close the carnival of destitution performing below them. The omni driver
shouts through his bullhorn the varied sights to behold: Tek a good look but dont be
afraid none. Despite their savage appearances an the physiognomic evidence o having
acquired a lesser form of uman life, these people will not arm ya! No mad toms as yer
used to on the West. No! Authentic everyone o em ere be. Catch that fallen chum set
against a doorjamb there, doubt e ever was a nobleman e, but e could ave been a
banker once! And so wed perform for the sympathizing eyes of the voyeurs, show them
that we are the dumbest of beasts, poor illucid creatures who do not talk so much as emit
a collective sound, these sighs of hope, our murmurings of vague desire piercing the
gloom of this murky atmosphere. Oer ere r r prostitutes, trolls we sometimes calls
them on a bad day, they charges from a bandy to a bender (thatd be yer rookerie
vernacular fer six pence to a shilling) four pennies fer a swift knee bender if thats whats
you like! Pardon me ladies! But each one o em ill earn twice the wages as a laborer yet
what they dont give to their bully they give to their mas an pas! And so the painted
gals on the street would curtsey and bow, and set their ample bosoms to tremble and
bounce, yet manage a sincere and pained expression as if to secretly reinforce to the
gentlewomen above that they were but poor wandering magdalens, ennobled by their
suffering and sad life, all seeking some way to finally die in a state of grace, having
finally acquired insight and potency from their fall. And oer ere to yer right, offering us
a wave of fellowship is the onorable Father Jay whose ouse o Light selflessly

administers to this flock o the degraded and fallen. Good eve Father! And so of course
who else should we offer our slummers on this six penny tour but our very own collared
Theseus, holding the thread in his hands as he wanders this dark labyrinth into which the
maidens and youths were served up nightly to the devouring Minotaurs of K, who have
no interest in good sportsmanship, the shriek of torture being the essence of their delight,
their purchases strapped and stripped, flogged and deflowered, in rooms carefully
prepared so as to not allow a single scream to escape, horrors that should have raised hell
but did not so much as raise the neighbors. And look ere as if on cue, a young Duke o
limbs following us with the curious leg e drags behind im like itwere a tail! No ma
Lady! Please keep yer coins warm and yer quids secreted ladies an gentlemen, toss it to
these grimy ands ere an it all rush on to drink! The ouse o Light will accept your
donations graciously an apply them righteously too.
And so we are a carnival of the misshapen, the unfortunate, the degenerate, the
devolved, the savage and rudimentary. And the audiences never loved us more, never
shrieked with such horror and delight, than when we appeared before them sliced and
rent to pieces, reduced to a drunken grin, a shamed scowl, a stumped torso and a scattered
mess of guts. And we would give them a show! Where else could you witness the
miserable forms humans will take to survive, the vile transformations the need to live can
command in sinew, face and loin! But sobriety would come eventually, and the light and
solemnity of day would dispel the night and so its veils across the poverty, waste,
sickness and filth that normally cloaked these streets.

And having been sober now for seven years, my eyes on this day could see quite
clearly. I knew the allure and understood the danger of these streets. Today, however,
rain or shine, it was essential that I return here, in many ways my life depended on it.
This was actually my first time to this quarter of K since the Oscillator, or Dome
as the townspeople called it, opened seven years ago. I can barely remember that day, as
glorious as it may have been, and there were few signs left of what that day had
promised. Yet on that momentous and transforming occasion, the City of K had hosted a
weeklong celebration of previously unknown pomp, triumph and revelry as a hundred
thousand people crammed into the streets of this quarter, the vast majority of them
laborers let off work for the day, carpenters, shopkeeps, nurses, fishmongers,
seamstresses, nightsoil men all joined of course by the most merry of vagrants every
one of us drunk, all of us enmeshed in a pageant of besotted clowns.
The parade route was surrounded three deep by blue vested soldiers. On various
stages throughout the town, the armys new artillery were positioned over the crowd,
beneath which were rows of marines in red blazers, long black rifles upon their shoulders.
The procession unleashed a panoply of men, beasts and machines never seen before in
our cold damp port. Every sponsoring country of the Oscillator had sent a representative
platoon of its fighting forces, as if we were celebrating the glories of war, the engineering
of death, the mastery of destruction. There were strange animals such as elephants and
camels, their huge rocking bodies blanketed with metal mesh and outfitted with feathers
and detailed armor. There were Negroes who were wearing nothing but tribal skirts,
fierce barbaric paintings marked their faces and chests as they danced barefoot on the
carpet of manure left by the animals ahead of them. There were Moors with their turbans

clutching gilded sabers, there were primitives from Ceylon, cannibals from distant
jungles, swarthy horsemen in leather chaps from across the sea, followed by men with
long swords, dressed in gold and crimson attire. There was a great procession of
unknown kings, even lesser known princesses, and nations that would have a name and
presence today only, cheered on mightily by the drunken crowds, only to be immediately
forgotten.
In the midst of all this I struggled to hold my ground against the human tide that
seemed to swell and push, ebb and flow with a life of its own far beyond the drunken
individuals that composed it. I strained to watch, but what I could see was all some
useless display of vanity, the pompous performance of insane and insensible races,
nothing more than a colossal debauch that gave the drunken derelicts of K a good reason
to drink and shout and jeer. And so in the end we linked arms, stranger to stranger, and
danced and sang songs together late into the night as the fog rolled in and smudged the
processions lights into oily flames that smoldered distantly, as if stabbed into faraway
shores, while the new Dome glowed like a perfect orb that had been raised from the very
center of the earth, within it mankinds very hope and salvation.
Today, but seven years later, the scene in this quarter of town is remarkably
different. Gone now are the refurbished storefronts and clean awnings promoting fresh
breads, leather goods and watches. Gone now are the litterfree streets, the carts of green
produce and flowers, fresh fish, piles of copper and cooking ware. Gone are the clean
sidewalks where Ks finest once strolled and hoped to be seen. Today, I walk past seedy
tobacco shops, card rooms, absinthe bars and darkened porticoes offering any and all
variety of stolen goods. My eyes see a familiar jungle, full of strange and desperate

10

sounds, fetid breath, foreign intentions. The men and women look at me askance, their
expressions hollow and savage. At a street corner, a young man with dark eyes beneath a
heavy brow holds out pornographic photos for sale, as a grimy street arab grabs my arm
to show me a gold watch, presumably from a drunk whose pockets are a bit lighter now.
A tattered Negro magician is willing to entertain me with a card trick or other sleight of
hand, I suppose, while children wait to more expertly pick my pockets if I should dare
stop. Prostitutes ply their offerings openly but with little enthusiasm, some but a dozen
years old if that beneath the white powder, the blurs of rouge, lip grease, grime and
bruises that mask their faces. Boys covered in little but dirt, gather in their tribal knots,
see me and touch their breasts.
Appearances in this part of town aside, there was still no denying that overall the
city of K had undergone a positive change in the years since the Dome was erected.
Unemployment was low and we all shared in a standard of living that others could only
dream of. While neighboring municipalities choked beneath the smoke of mills and
factories, we lived beside the clean radiance of the Dome. Inside this structure thousands
of handsomely paid workers, men and women, received a healthy paycheck each Friday
with extra money to spend. And so, like mushrooms, the opportunities to spend those bits
sprouted and choked off whatever ideas we had for a true renaissance in this part of K
years ago. The peripheral and weed-like elements of common greed and temptation could
not be denied. By a form of urban entropy this portion of K was dragged back to a state
beyond even its worst periods of the past, boasting decay, decadence and disorder while
other areas of the city emerged overnight, renewed and recast with vibrancy and

11

prosperity. All the while the Dome, indifferent as it was constant, radiated and hummed
its steady aura.
So on this day I walked cautiously down the cobbled streets dodging the sewage,
pinching my nose beneath a kerchief against the stench of fish guts and coal gas. Had I
even a few coppers in my pocket, I doubt I would have made it to my destination this day.
The forgotten habits of yesteryear were aroused by the clamor and chaos that jousted with
me as I walked through these streets. But unlike the con man, without coin I had no
currency. Against these temptations, poverty was my prophylactic.
And so I walked and looked, studied and vaguely reminisced, until I reached the
gated entrance where I was told to be at 11 a.m.

* * *

12

Humans have the most repulsive odor he said, perhaps noticing the discomfort
in my face even if the only perspiration takes place here. He tapped a finger to his
temple.
The stench that rose from below us, it seemed to me, was even more unbearable
than on the streets outside.
But it is one of the things that bonds us, he added, yes, youll see.
I nodded my head, still awestruck over what I saw before me.
Do you have some questions you would like to ask it?
What kind of question? I asked.
Anything. Any question you like.
Well, let me see, how about who will win The Ashes?
Ah yes, he chuckled loudly, you and who knows how many others are asking that
question today. Thats fine. Lets offer something more. How about something a little
more personal?
I was unsure as to whether to challenge this man, my instinct told me to choose
something simple, to play it safe.
Okay, how many children do I have?
Good. And one more. Something, lets say, a little more challenging.
Challenging huh? Well, how many children will I have?

13

My wife was three months pregnant with our first, only our doctor would know
following her visit to him later today.
Good, a question about the future, he said. That should test them. Now write
down your name and address and all three questions on these pieces of paper and pass
them to me.
After I had done as he asked, he placed my questions in separate glass jars,
opened a round door, dropped in a jar, closed the door, pressed a button which illumined
a red light, then within seconds a vacuum sucked my first question down the pneumatic
tube. When the light went off, he repeated with the second jar which sped off with my
second question.
So how long does it take? I asked.
Varies, he said as he sent my third question on its way, sometimes a few minutes,
some questions might take years, we never actually know.
From the observation deck on which we stood, the people several stories below
appeared as but a restless swarm of insects spreading for acres across the coliseum floor.
Above us the view was just as incredible, an impossibly expansive domed roof consisting
of eight-sided cells like a honeycomb, no visible pillars or other means of support, as if
you were looking into the inner cavern of a hot air balloon. On its surface was a giant
map of the world. The sun outside presented a yellow smudge just above the city of New
York.
Its an ingenious design, dont you agree, my guide commented, his hand
gesturing towards the vast latticework across the ceiling. This is the largest dome in the
world. Nothing even compares. Consider the Pantheon, Brunelleschis Duomo and these

14

recent attempts to build open domes, well here we span nearly ten times these other
structures. Brunelleschi himself said the sky was envious of his dome, tossing its
thunderbolts down upon it. While he built his masterpiece with engineering genius and
an octagonal design, we built ours with octagons and mathematics. But as you can see,
there really is no comparison. So imagine the skys stare upon us!
He laughed heartily and I had to agree. The view inside was remarkably more
impressive than what you gained looking at this structure from outside on the city streets.
As a mathematician it must please you as much as it does me, he continued. But
bees came up with the idea first, not us. Millions of years ago, I assume. Originally we
were uncertain how large this project would become, so we had only a general idea of
how big the roof would have to be. This design allowed us to keep building from the
outer edges like bees would, permitting us to expand as this project evolved without
losing structural integrity.
Where we stood a warm heavy draft rose past us, a flow saturated with the stench
from the floor far below. A counter ran the length of the circular observation deck, on its
surface numerous notebooks and charts were scattered about, a few pairs of binoculars, a
Swedish crank telephone and a telegraph machine. Across from me was a sliding
drafting board consisting of a large translucent canvas, on its surface a sheet of paper
lined with a fine grid. Beneath the counter were the openings for the pneumatic delivery
tubes. Above, incandescent light bulbs pulsed and wavered between us and the Arctic
regions illuminated on the roof.
My guide laughed again. Ironically, he said, if we had had the Oscillator before
we began to build it, we may very well have built it quite differently. All we had then

15

were our simple minds working in a simple, single fashion. But it turns out this roof is the
perfect configuration for maintaining a healthy circulation, the right balance between
keeping in heat when it is cold and maintaining a pleasant coolness during the warmer
months, it is engineered to withstand winds, even cyclones better than any pitched roof,
and it actually grows stronger the larger we make it. Makes me wonder what we lose
when we trust other ways of finding answers than our own brain, even with all our
cerebral limitations.
He was hardly an imposing man, probably in his sixties. Under the lights above,
the features of his face were cast in sharp planes of shadow, shards of broken detail. His
white hair was receded from his broad forehead, his nose cutting a dark line between the
shadows of his eyes and lighted patches of his cheek. A full beard launched from his face
like a shout of smoke covering his mouth, thereby positioning his head on a small cloud
atop his shoulders which stooped forward but otherwise disappeared into the background
behind him. There was a carelessness in his dress and grooming, a rumpled and disjointed
appearance, but I wouldnt have expected anything else. When one thinks of supermen,
of men who are legends, pillars of our time, you cant help but give them qualities other
men dont have. We expect what is roaring inside their hearts and heads to be somehow
manifest in the exterior as well. As unfair as this inclination is, I was disappointed to find
myself in the company of such a superman, yet one I could have easily found on any city
street. Yet in just these few moments with him, I imagined that he would stand at a street
corner and actual thank God that he was in fact just like the rest of us; he possessed little
of the vacant gentility that ultimately impoverished so many of our upper class denizens.
In short, there was nothing great to be seen in this great man.

16

And quite a view from here isnt it? he asked, perhaps disappointed in my lack of
conversation. Have you even been inside the Oscillator before today?
No, I said, I may be one of the few living in K deprived in that way. I must admit,
I had little interest in it before. But now, well, I have so many questions. I dont know
where to start.
Ask whatever you please.
Well, first of all, what are all these thousands of people doing?
Sixty four thousand people to be exact, he answered. Computors we call them.
They are calculating. Performing calculations. It is very simple really. Surely you know
some people who work here?
Of course, I said, but they never can tell me what they do.
He handed me a pair of binoculars. The men in their clean white shirts and the
women in their crisp grey or tan jackets were seated at their carriages with one hand
punching away at their mechanical calculators while the other hand sifted through papers
and ledgers like any other clerical workers youd see at a bank or accounting office.
Several women were scurrying about picking up bits of paper and other trash, the entire
place was extraordinarily tidy given the amount of activity that was taking place.
Youll soon see, he said
However, in form, which I indeed tried hard to see, and in function, which I could
not even begin to grasp, the Oscillator was nothing as I had thought. What was I indeed
looking at? I did not know. And all around me there was a definite buzz to the air, an
electrical charge that pricked at your skin and teased your hair. And then, of course, there
was the noise.

17

* * *

18

This slime that clings like deaths spittle to yer ands an fingers, my father told
me when I was young, tis but evidence o the fishs bleeding once theyre out owater.
I was a child that lived covered, bundled and doing constant battle with that slime
sure as I was cauled in the substance the moment I was spawned. In the days following
my birth, the slime came directly from my mothers fishcart, which early in the morning
was piled high with mackerel, eels, cod and whatever else she could negotiate from the
fishermen at the docks. From that pile shed choose and gut and chop and scale and the
resulting slime would cover her hands, bind her hair, rise and fall off her labors and so
then onto me and all that sought harbor beneath and around her cart, and so contributed to
the dense form and odor that permeated every aspect of the air, water and firmament that
we inhabited. It was a mucosal world that I entered early with knife and cleaver, learning
before I could read where to slice an eel and how to cut a redfish while the slime oozed
and bubbled, covering my body from head to leg.
My father was a laborer in the shipyard, a man who was as large and square as the
crates and cartons, planks and trusses that shaped the docks where he worked when work
came available, otherwise using his idle time to consider and systematize whatever stray
elements came to his mind. And so always one to seek a philosophical explanation to
things common as well as complex, he had a belief that I judged was core to his own
being, the belief that we all originated from the sea. His religious inclinations did not

19

seem to collide with this and if they so threatened he surely would have moved one or the
other to create ample room for both.
It seems natural, does it not? he said, we aint irsute like the apes, not most o us
anyhow, no, bald we all be like the dolphins, like the whale an the manatee.
But it was a cousin born with webbed toes that cinched it for him, transmutated
thought to fact, theory to reality.
According to my father the difference between sea and land creatures is that while
those of the sea barter their fluids with the ocean in a free and constant manner, we
terrestrials learned how to contain our blood in order to traipse freely on land. So when
you bring a fish out of the water, it has no such containment and so continues to bleed in
the air as it does in the water. To demonstrate this to me one day my dad took a dead
chub from my mums cart and with her big knife hacked it in two, holding up the severed
fish to prove it had bled away, its inner flesh as clean as ice.
Now to prove me point, he shouted, boy! old out yer arm!
But slime was as ubiquitous as the stench of the river here on the docks, there was
no escaping the substance transferred from the dying creatures of the sea and cast like
wet unfamiliar prayers upon our world. The mist that came in off the river each evening
was heavy and briny with the ooze of fish, this fog like the deep, final exhalation of a
million creatures that had swooned during the day, a hazy river of defeat that flowed
through the thin black arteries that were our streets and alleyways. These dark tides made
their restless way through stone and timber, seeped past feather, hair and skin, its foul
glistening gasp one with both the living and inert. We awoke to darkened mornings, the
slime covering our faces with a wet nocturnality, blurring our eyes, even our blankets

20

were heavy and wet with the residue we wrought from the ocean. We first stirred in the
soft tangles of these cold damp cocoons, shivering in the dispersed lifeblood of all that
had slowly expired. While outside, a brooding mugginess clung heavily and fluctuant to
the lower sky in the morning, a decaying mist that would slowly fade with the sun,
leaving behind a substance dying, congealing into stoniness, a glistening residue dusting
the flat stones in the street.
The quays defined one border of a rough and crowded neighborhood of
dilapidated wooden structures green with sea rot, concrete warehouses with towering
metal doors, brick trusses and archways that covered the walkways, limiting the sky to a
thin cut here of grey cloud or on a rare occasion a sharp triangle of blue. Signs and
discarded boxes, broken furniture and long forgotten cargo were piled along the streets
and alleyways, crowding the city even more unto itself. Here the streets and sidewalks
teamed day and night with immigrants, sailors, and the poor migrants from the country
who sought work in the sweats or had been brought into the city to labor on the new
underground trains. The other borders were not as clean, they flowed out, joining with
the rest of the city, at times expanding, at other times receding, changing over time not
unlike the river tide itself. My childhood here was spent amidst a gang of kids that I
would have no trouble calling friends, but looking back no special bond existed between
us other than the one forged by the simple, seemingly innate laws of the streets; rules that
required you to stand up for one another, to protect your honor and the honor of your
gang, to be faithful always. Yet none of these laws whether unspoken or timidly carved
into skin sufficed to create what I would later call a friendship.

21

This too was where I learned the other basics of life: how to gamble, how to steal,
how to fight. As everyone here chose occupations early in life, I was best at the latter and
in my youth was often called upon as arbiter to a dispute, an unidentified tiff that usually
had nothing to do with me. I would find myself surrounded by a ring of kids comprised
of my gang and another set of rivals, where I would then be confronted by a boy usually
twice my size huffing and puffing and coming at me with his fists raised. I was fast on
my feet and with my hands, and no one could take a punch like I could. So said my
reputation and so followed my success.
Problem is, my father would say, man does not usually know why e fights, like a
dog, e follows an inner voice an obeys what it tells im to do. An so to is detriment so
be is demise.
He would tell me that while the voice of rage may be the loudest voice in my
head, there was another voice that I was not listening to, a voice that would come to me if
only I was prepared, a voice he could not make me hear, that I had to hear on my own.
But once I heard that voice, he warranted, I would be on the right path. Even though I
had never seen him raise a fist towards anyone, his hands, as large as boxes with fingers
broad and square, seemed so full and so capable of such terrible violence that I felt
compelled to nod and promise him I would resist any more fights. The next day, despite
the prior nights sincerity, my promises would be broken. Such was life here. And so that
is what hands were for, to make fists, to strike and batter.
Perhaps because my father maintained a clear head and a simple but
uncompromised vision, he noticed the few small things about me that were unusual yet
what others would call strange and perhaps feeble. He told the story more than once that

22

when I was young, I used to gather up the fish scales from my mothers cutting and
divide them into piles of clear, blue, silver and black. The clear scales were the most
numerous and so these I made the farthings. The blue were the pennies. Silver were six
pence and the black the bobs. Sitting proudly and protectively behind my cache, I told my
parents I would make them rich. My father found me counting the number of planks in
the road, the layers of brick that came up to a window, that made a doorway. I grew
excited, he said, if the number in one was the same as I had counted on a different
building. Beating a stick against the timber posts, I timed the waves as they slapped
against the quay. I would play for hours with the rings of oil on the surface of a puddle, I
chased wind devils as if trying to capture an escaping eel. As I grew older I would sort
my mothers fish by size, creating living charts with the smallest in the middle, the largest
on the outsides and then comparing one species with another. I was forever measuring, I
was obsessed with comparing, I didnt ask questions, I sought answers to things that I did
not know existed. My closest friends were not flesh and blood but these strange and
ephemeral relationships, which I continually sought and rediscovered everywhere. My
dad saw this in me and realized I needed to a chance to find out what these alien faculties
could do outside the quays.
When I was thirteen, my mother died while pregnant with the uncounted blessing
that would have been my brother. She lay in our house for three days while we waited for
the undertaker to come take her body away. I stayed with my father all that time. He
refused to leave her side, his attachment perfected during all those years would not abate
simply because her breath and blood had so abated, and so when the man finally arrived
early one morning, I could tell my father did not want him or anyone else to touch her.

23

But her face had grown dark, her eyes had sunk into a shadowy mask of impatience, her
countenance sagging into diminishing planes of familiarity and growing patches of
something terribly strange. Her lips had grown tight, protective of some lonely despair
and upon this, her unspoken wish he must have realized she had to leave on this
strangers cart. After they had taken her away, my father turned to me and held out his
hand in a gesture I immediately saw as asking something from me, something, regardless
of what it was, I could not afford to give at this moment. I turned and ran. I dashed
down the alleyway, past the shouts of kids who knew me and others who took up the calls
as if I had stolen something. I ran across the streets and through traffic, then when I got
to the wooden quays I hit a wet slimy patch of board and fell hard, sliding across the
wood until I was stopped by a man and a smell I had never encountered before. I looked
up into a face that carved a vast black hole against the sky. It was the darkest face I had
ever seen. His skin was black as the darkest sea and in that blackness were dark red
designs, carvings that swirled across his cheeks and arched above his brows, markings
that could have mapped the voyages of ships or the whirlwinds of rage once faced on the
ocean depths. His eyes were jaundiced yellow and when he smiled at me his teeth were
muddy nobs in mottled gums pink and black. He picked me up and I saw in his arms
more of the red designs, whorling patterns that broke and repeated into smaller whorls, all
covering muscles even larger and more rigid than my fathers. He spoke to me in a
language I could not understand and set me right upon my feet. In his hair was the slime
that covered us all, still glittering on his black nap, dried to a salty powder on his temples.
He picked up his canvas bags, hoisted each to a shoulder, turned and walked away. He
was barefoot, black feet with tired yellow soles. I saw then the two pointed, scarred and

24

fin-like stumps where his hands should be. This chimera of man and sea vanished amidst
the crowds on the quay, between the jutting buildings, the crooked windows, the jagged
stacks of imported boxes, the veils of sailing ships, the slashes of cloud, the glassy
fragments of open sky, the broken bits of the horizon, this chimera of man and he came as
if from the watery depths of my fathers convictions and vanished amidst wood and
stone, the fog and light cutting through a shattered sky, the hearty shouts of morning, the
last whimpers from the nights distress, between shafts of day and crevices of night,
between the fables of before and the hopes of tomorrow this chimera of man and we
vanished amidst the wooden pilings and empty skiffs, a grove of rubber trees, brick
archways and dark openings, huts gathered from the earth, the bows and sails and ropes
of schooners, a vast jungle, the southern cross, this chimera of man and me vanished
down the street, beneath the city clock, under a noisy flock of gulls begging for fish guts,
amidst the dull ache of morning he vanished through men leaving their stay at the casual
house, men gathering early for a new night, through the open windows of the coffee shop
and through the shuttered door of the public house he vanished now with a face drawn
and painted unlike the others, implacable to their fear and curiosity, his stumps like razors
to their soft flowery hands, and so disappearing, so vanishing, so walking away he takes
with him a smell of distant lands I could never forget.

* * *

25

A few days prior to my first visit to the Oscillator, I had received an invitation in
the post from the esteemed and venerable scientist, Dr. Z. Like everyone in K, I knew
who this man was. Scientific developments stole front page position in the daily news,
men argued about synchronicity and longitude in the public houses, women spoke of the
rituals and habits of distant tribes, our heroes were chemists, naturalists and physicists
who gave us glimpses into hereto unseen worlds. Dr. Z was the man who had brought K
the Oscillator.
As something of a mathematician myself, I had never met Dr. Z but why would I
have? Under what circumstances would I ever share an audience with his genius? Yet
here in my hands was a hand written request that I come see him about tutoring his
grandson in arithmetic. Not so strange, I tried to assure myself, as men of his caliber
rarely had the ability let alone the patience to teach others the basics of their field of
knowledge; their minds, preoccupied with more complex problems, forget how the
fundamental concepts are difficult to the novice, were even once difficult even for them.
And it is clear to me from my own work as a tutor, that parents rarely teach their own
children, and children rarely desire to learn from their parents.
In any case, this letter offered me a job. Upon reading its contents my heart first
soared then immediately sank. Surely Dr. Z knew what everyone in K knew. Still I did
not hesitate to send a letter back telling him I would be there in two days. My wife and I

26

desperately needed the money, but to be honest, my need was fashioned from something
more desperate than that.
Anyone who lived in K knew of the Oscillator. How could you not know of it!
But ask anyone about its purpose or function, and youd never field a reliable answer.
What was its purpose? What took place beneath that massive structure, which looked
stone-like and inert by day, but glowed and pulsed with life at night? And on this morning
as I began walking towards town, I realized how little these questions had even faintly
disturbed my mind. In fact, I wondered, how much of life is spent believing we know the
answer to a particular question, only to one day realize that we never had an answer, in
fact, we had faithfully avoided the question altogether? I believe we play this game all
the time. I believe we live our lives under multifarious shrouds of half truth and feigned
knowing as a matter of course. That is how we function, most of us, it is how we deal
with fear, it is how we ignore our ignorance. And so I could not tell you what the Dome
was, I could not answer as to its function or reason.
Perhaps as a way to pardon myself and so excuse my own deficiencies, I blame
this ignorance partially on our milieu. We are a society that has access to more knowledge
than ever before, yet, as individuals perhaps we have never known so little. Through our
science and technologies, we are the true masters of the world! And so, having mastered
it, we no longer think about the world, we merely observe it while it runs, we watch it
manufacture, sort, package, build and tear down, as if it was a magnificent machine made
up of parts and operations that are all completely known and understood. Few would
argue that advances during the past twenty years have far outpaced what we
accomplished during all civilizations prior. Machines do our every task! Man is only

27

dirtied servicing the machines that service his will! What do we have in the way of
necessities or amenities that is not today mechanized and automated? We type now
instead of write, we communicate over electrical lines instead of with paper and ink.
Factories are leading the way, both cutting down on the number of laborers and reducing
the wages for those remaining workers, thereby making products cheaper than ever
before. We are consumers first, god fearing people second! We have cut the world down
in size! No place on earth is safe from mans invasion! Horses will be gone completely in
just a matter of time. Even bicycles will be tossed aside when we each embrace the
cheap motorized cars today plentiful overseas. We are now free to see the sky as our
domain, as airplanes carry us for miles through space forbidden to man since the days of
Daedalus. It cannot be denied! In the span of only years, we have witnessed nothing
more than the utter and complete mechanization of our world. And with that, I believe,
our willingness or even desire to ask questions has gravely diminished.
Which is to say mankind has control now, he can forge and fashion his future. He
can build as high as he needs to build, no frontier is beyond his eventual reach. With
mastery of speed comes mastery of time. He can see far into the heavens, and look with
equal distance into minutiae, our dual visions of infinity. The dimensions of the world are
breaking apart, the old world crumbling, revealing its weaknesses in structure as well as
form, calling for man to reach in and put it all back together again. We have gained all it
seems mastery, control, wealth not limitations! We rely on the machine for the
answers, which it produces from simple calculi. Meanwhile, the critical questions no
longer matter, are not even asked.

28

Perhaps because we expect answers to come as a matter of calculation, we no

longer even wonder what makes a man. Perhaps, man is now what he makes. Once an
ape gains an opposable thumb and a brain to control it, he becomes what he
manufactures. In other words, if technology conquers all, then technology must explain
all and all must be as technology is. That we can build anything from steel and glass, so
must man be. That we can create gears and levers to calculate our most complex
arithmetic, so must mans mind be. And the Dome was the shining example of this new
attitude in all its glorious dimensions. And so stunned into silence by it burnished aura
we no longer ask.
Despite its grace and beauty, the Dome was still a monstrosity, the likes of which
no visionary such as Vernes or pessimist such as Wells could have put to paper. And so, I
faced terrible dilemmas as I struggled as a mathematician who admired the powers of
thought and as an ordinary person who felt that man himself has been too careless, too
proud, too insecure to foresee what dangers his ideas might contain. In the Dome, man
builds what he both admires and fears, he unveils a monument that can not be understood
by the very faculty that created it.
To be fair to the others in K, no one cared other than the Dome brought wealth
and jobs and stability; with those things our needs were sated. And so satisfied, our minds
grow sleepy to any other thoughts or concerns. Yet come sit in a public house and share
some putrid air or better yet a beer with one of the down and out, one of the
disenfranchised, the cockney scum, the worthless bottom dwellers of our society. Sit for
a bit, let your stomach get over the gnawing stench, the peeling filth worn like garments
on their skin, get yourself past the deep pores in their faces, the holes where teeth should

29

be to keep their wagging tongues tight in their mouths, the glazed eyes that dart back and
forth at you like a caged rat when you get past all that ugliness, take a real risk and
engage the bloke in a conversation. If you do this let me tell you, within minutes you will
hear all the songs and philosophies that would put Homer and his band of beggars to
shame! Thats right! Having crushed our thinking faculties beneath the machinery of our
society and the banality of our civilization, the only true philosophers left are these
disregarded and abandoned scum squirming out a living amidst the vermin and pox of the
slums. They, with nothing, nothing in their pockets, nothing in their homes, and nothing
to gain or lose, they are the only ones left who will talk about life, about death, about
right and wrong. They alone have a concern about affairs, they alone see connections
between the continents, they alone still hear the rhythms of time, they alone hold on to
the past and set it up for approximate measure with the present, a prism on which the
future will be split apart and freely examined. Untouched by technologys mastery, left
out of the celebration of mans triumphs over the heavens and the seas, these poor sods
are left with nothing but their inner thoughts and endless ruminations. And so without
them, without the drunks and the lost souls, we are a wasteland of real thought, of proper
contemplation.
No, the prosperity that the Dome had brought to K did not reach us all. My
jobless companions aside, a mathematics teacher eked out the barest of livings, unless of
course you worked at the Dome, which I had so far refused to do. I too could have sought
employment there, but I had so far refused to do so. I told me wife that I was a
mathematician not a pencil pusher. But that was not the real reason. Something inside of
me told me that this glowing miracle of progress built on the banks of our river was not to

30

be totally trusted or believed, that like the giant steam engines that now openly polluted
our skies and rendered men cripples, this was but another monument to mans
technological folly. Man, for the most part, was capable of nothing more than his own
demise.
Despite my training, I did not believe like so many others that science was the
language of progress, I did not believe that technology was the key to success. Hideous
propositions about mans nature and the future of society were overpopulating the pages
of our scientific journals and the shelves of popular book stores. As a mathematician, I
could fantasize that mathematics was the song to which the universe sang its many and
various tunes, but man was a poor excuse for a conductor, clumsy, prejudiced, deaf, dumb
and blind. In short, with all its majesty and wonder, I believed that in the Dome we had
simply built a cleaner, a more ecclesiastically appealing tribute to a false prophecy that
would ultimately be used or blamed for our downfall.
My suspicions and skepticism were tested, however, every time an eviction
noticed appeared, every day that we did not have money for meat, every time my wife
discovered a rent in her dress.
Yet in my heart, I was a statistician; that was who I was, perhaps from birth, yes
even before my faculties could manage a single number, I groped for certainty and felt
for chance. I can not rest comfortably on opinion, belief or even the learned judgment of
the most erudite men, and certainly not my own. I needed to know that a mathematical
expression lay behind a statement, that a fact was indeed supported by data that was
measurable, quantifiable, and within the boundaries of error. We are a society of laws,
yet we have no scientific basis to even our most basic legislation. Myth, repetition and

31

convenience rule our ideas about the world. We claim to be an empire based on science,
yet even our most basic beliefs beg scrutiny and proof. We walk through life guided not
by the signposts of fact but by the deceit of habit and the arbiter of superstition. We
design punishment to deter criminals, but do you know that longer prison terms increase
the likelihood of repeat criminals? We ascribe by the laws of supply and demand but do
you know that higher prices for some goods will create more demand not less? Do you
know that as our worlds population has increased the frequency of war has decreased?
That people who win the least will gamble the most? That children from families that
solely speak a foreign language at home do better in school than native speakers? That
lightening is more likely to strike the same place twice? Common sense is a vacuum of
fact, a reliquary of fictions. I could not trust what I could not faithfully analyze. At the
same time, my most guiding faculties were ironically my instincts and my intuition. And
so they fought with each other, I fought with myself, constantly, and will until the end.
And so my cynicism in general combined with my reticence to believe in this
vagarious enterprise made it all the more strange as to why and how this distinguished
man of science chose me. With a look of desperation, my wife told me to swallow my
doubts, stop questioning this sudden good fortune and think about what was best for her
and me. In her eyes I could see that she felt something was about to change in our lives,
and I was the one who held the key to that.
* * *

32

Dr. Z had long ago gained an international reputation as a naturalist who had
developed a passion for meteorology. Thats right, one of the most brilliant minds
obsessed with the weather. Indeed, how is it that we find a sense of absurdity in
classifying weather as an academic pursuit? Every aspect of our lives depends on it, yet
we think it childish to study. We are all so accustomed to the attitude that weather cannot
be understood or predicted, that few would allow it to qualify as a bona fide field of
academia. This has not been helped by the cast of characters that have tried to advance
the science of meteorology through the years. Past meteorologists include some
esteemed company such as Jean Baptiste Lamarck who aside from extolling his doomed
theory of evolution through acquired traits also proposed a respectable classification for
clouds. Then on the less glamorous side of history, there was the infamous sea captain
Robert Fitzroy, the first forecaster of the Royal Society, a phrenologist and physiognomist
who chose firstmates by the fulcrum of their brain, that is, the shape of their noses, a
devout man who commanded the Beagle and accompanied Darwin around the world on
that famous voyage only to find out in the end that he had helped the great scientist to
gather the evidence that would relegate his God to a distant, passive position. Fitzroy
would be the second Beagle captain to take his own life. Others were mere farmers with
no schooling, saddle makers, astronomers gone astray from their celestial habits and
certainties, mathematicians who suddenly gained an entrepreneurial sprit and a penchant

33

for taking gold on promises to make it rain. In other words, meteorology seems to attract
men with less understandable ambitions. Frances esteemed physicist Francois Arago,
who published his own set of essays on meteorology, had said quite poignantly: Never, no
matter what may be the progress of science, will honest scientists who care for their
reputation venture to predict weather! And yet Dr. Z, one of the most honored scientists
of our time, effortlessly dedicated his career to understanding the weather.
And today, for reasons I would not understand until later, this great man was
dedicating a good portion of his day to tell me the personal story behind this massive
structure. The pulpit on which we stood was about ten meters in diameter and rose
perhaps nine or ten stories from the center of the floor. Below us was a tremendous
theater in which the circles of people rose from the lowest point directly beneath us in a
series of counter levered stages, the furthest one four or five stories high at the perimeter.
From six projection lights mounted to the observation deck a map of the entire world was
cast upon the Domes inner surface. Above us were of course the polar regions, K was
directly across from us, the tropics surrounded the giant girth while Antarctica was
divided across the lowest region. These massive images wavered and flickered with the
fluctuations in voltage. From our position there was the supreme feeling of godliness as
we surveyed nothing less than the entire world while invisibly commanding the atomistic
elements below which brought the Oscillator to its undeniable life.
For years, Dr. Z was saying, I thought that one person could solve many of the
major problems of the world, if only he or she had the time to dedicate to that task. This
is what genius has traditionally been all about: one person, one brain, eventually coming
up with the Answer. Perhaps that Answer came about through years of work, perhaps

34

through a dream one night. The geniuses that loom largest in history seem to be the ones
who created in isolation: Newton on a small farm where he sought to escape the plague.
Kant who never traveled more than one hundred miles from the town of Konigsberg.
Beethoven in a mind that was deaf to the world. Darwin in a country home amidst his
fears and torments. And now this young Einstein alone in his patent office. And so it
seemed that all genius required was discipline and time, with that would come results.
But I was wrong. For problems of a certain nature and scope, yes, a single brain may be
all that is necessary, may be optimal in fact. But this assumes that all ideas are based on
simple rational elements and that complex ideas would be found through the
transformation of these simple elements into forms that would explain the emergent
complexity.
The fact is, the world is made up of many kinds of problems, and not all problems
can be solved with the same approach. The real truth is we have discarded many
potentially interesting questions about the world because they do not fit the requirements
we have for solving problems. If they are not simple, if they are not rational, if they are
not predictable we push them aside, ignore them, declare them as unimportant. For
hundreds of years, we have only been solving the problems that are solvable. Putting
aside the ones we could not. Imagine that! Well, weather was one of those unimportant,
unsolvable and therefore nonexistent problems. I realized the human mind may be
brilliant, but it is also quite lazy.
I know you have had your own thoughts about the weather, he said to my
complete surprise.

35

And indeed I had accumulated over the years many stray notes trying to correlate
the days and months, the various clouds, the sun and moon, the flocks of birds, the
abundance or scarcity of flies and beetles, aches and pains, accidents in the streets, the
moods of the general populace among other factors of the weather. But how could he
have known? I looked at him quizzically.
Many still believe I am foolish to think that there can be a mathematical model to
predict the weather, he continued. True, we have had to make due with models that do
not take into account evaporation, condensation, clouds, well almost anything to do with
water. And true we had to assume the world was flat, and then there are the
complications of oceanic air streams, traveling vortices and wave fronts. How about the
global winds as we saw with Krakatau, winds that take two years to circulate the globe?
Sometimes I concede that my critics may be right. But I believe in the task set forth by
my young, my most brilliant colleague, Professor Bjerknes, when he said that weather
forecasting is just a matter of solving systems of equations. The question is which
equations and how many? And then, if we had the equations, would we have the time to
do the calculations before the weather we were trying to predict had passed us by?
Weather as we know is a global phenomena. To sample the world to give any kind
of accurate reading would require collecting data at more than one hundred thousand
locations. At each location we would seek data on more than twelve variables probably
at least twenty four times a day. In other words we need to perform about thirty million
calculations per day to plot the weather. How do we do all those calculations? If one
person could do one calculation per minute, then he can perform four maybe five hundred
calculations a day. We would need

36

Sixty thousand people, I interrupted.

Thats right, he said, about sixty thousand people working every minute of every
day.
But cant these calculating machines you have work through these equations? I
asked. I thought that was what they were designed to do, to get rid of the human
drudgery in doing mindless calculations over and over again.
Down there we have Burroughs, Wales and Mercedes calculators. More than one
for every person on the floor. The most sophisticated machines available to us. But they
are all the same. Not what Babbage dreamed of, not by a long shot. These machines are
just gears and levers that add and subtract over and over and over again. They cant solve
the problems we are talking about. You know Babbage never did build a calculating
machine that worked and for that he is famous. During the same time, the Swede
inventor Scheutz is forgotten for having built one that worked. Yet even Scheutzs
contraption seldom worked well enough. And I believe there must be a fundamental
reason for that.
We are dealing with something that may well be beyond the realm of machines,
he continued., something the genius Poincare has seen and describes in his new
publication on chance. And that is a limitation to our approach to problems of the world.
We are dealing with something in nature that we have forever seen but never recognized.
We are coming face to face with the most common pattern in the universe, the similar but
nonrepeating pattern, the oscillation. Our wonderful machines aside, we still need the
human element. You will see all this soon enough.

37

* * *

38

Even without my mothers fishmonger income, my father was somehow able to

pay the tuition at a boys school which I attended instead of following him to work at the
docks or carrying dirt at the tunneling projects like my gangmates. For the most part this
new school was just another arena where fights were arranged, where I took on boys who
were not nearly as tough or experienced as the ones on the docks, and whom I dispatched
of quite quickly.
The principal of the school was a broken, irritable man whose left side of his face
had been horribly scarred in the war, the event had removed his cheek, his eye was
constantly open and watering. This man had it in for me from the first day of school. He
took one look at my battered shoes, tattered pants and put me in a category that would
eventually, I believed, lead to my dismissal. That day should have been the one when he
grabbed me by the collar, picked me clean off the ground and held me like a stray cat
while he sent the boy I was pummeling off running. He held me up peering at me from
his terrible eye, about to shout those final words from his crooked mouth, when a voice
behind us called out.
Let me take him, that voice said. It was OBrien, a teacher of math and science at
the school.
What? The boys incorrigible, the principal said. Time he went back to the quays
where fighting is their pastime.

39

I know him, Sir, he is in one of my classes, OBrien said. Please, let me take him
And for some reason the principal let me go.
After the principal had walked away, OBrien told me to meet him the next day at
the gymnasium, but only if I really wanted to learn how to fight.
From this square jawed man with what he called his Philly accent, I did in fact
learn to fight, but my lessons commenced only when I completed my school studies.
Away from the gym, OBrien introduced me to the world of geometry, a place that I had
long sought to enter while standing at real doorways and windows knowing I was at the
threshold to some new place, yet unable to maneuver past the doorjambs and panes of
glass. I discovered a magnified level of joy in figures drawn on paper compared to the
pleasure I had scrounged for years as a small child from those shapes and stuff of the
ordinary world.
At the same time, this gentle man smoothed out my own rough, halting brogue,
brought me more fully in touch with words spoken and so imagined. And he quickly saw
my interest in science. OBrien had his own special interest, a passion for beetles. In his
classroom were beautiful wooden boxes with glass lids and velvet interiors, exquisite
reliquaries where upon pins his collections were displayed. He had beetles from the
nearby countryside, beetles from the forests of Germany, from the deserts of Africa.
Stilled upon their mounts, they looked like bits of jewelry, not insects. The gargantuan
Titanus with its carapace of polished cherry wood, the curved iron scimitar of the
Hercules beetle, the spider like Blister beetle with a body of pitted coal, the Glorious
beetle with its armor of gleaming jade. They were organized by size and shape and other
shared characteristics and so arranged they seemed to float through and across the display

40

like the manifestation of some preternatural song. When I conveyed this observation to
him, OBrien told me that long ago our language was more closely connected to the
things of the world, along the way our words have lost that connection and so now many
words seem to have little relation to things like stones, trees and bugs.
At the gym, he taught me how to move, how to protect myself, how to pull back
when tired. Rarely where his lessons about how to hit or punch, which was all I knew.
Instead, he told me how to watch the other fighter, how to look for weaknesses, how to
mask my own. I often grew frustrated with his methods, so slow and abstract they
seemed at times, and it was not unusual after a few rounds in the ring for me to drop this
discipline and suddenly rip into my opponent with a fury, always to my victory. One day
after such a fight, he stepped in to spar with me.
Cmon, show me what Ive taught you, he said.
I stepped through the motions, kept my fists up and my head back, moved my feet
to keep me square with him, as he jabbed, tapping at my head, barking out what I was
doing wrong. Bap, bap, bap! his glove smacked against my forehead. Up, up, up! he
barked as some kids began to snicker outside the ropes. Finally I had had enough and
launched into him with my fists flying wildly. He easily side stepped my assault and
pushed me to the mat. I got up and came at him again. He again stepped aside and
knocked me down with a harder shove. Furious I stood back up, my heart pounding, the
other boys now jeering and laughing. My nostrils flaring for breath, my eyes burning
with rage, I retreated to the stance he had taught me, I kept covered and kept my distance.
I was avoiding his jabs now and I could see that he was beginning to sweat. He was no
longer smiling. I noticed that his eyes were not as intensely focused, he seemed

41

distracted. I kept moving, shuffling my feet, maintaining my balance, using my shoulders

to duck his jabs. Then I saw him look away, his eyes glanced away from me and as if
propelled by instinct my left fist darted out and caught him squarely on the jaw,
staggering him for a bare but noticeable second. In a flash his eyes cleared and seared at
me in a fury so intense I dropped my hands and waited for punishment or death. The boys
outside the ring were quiet. OBrien did nothing.
You did the right thing, he said, I lost my focus. You are learning. Youre learning
well.
There was a method and a strategy to fighting that I would never have known
otherwise. OBrien had won a World Championship not so many years ago, won and
then lost it soon thereafter. For a few lucrative years he had traveled the world, fighting
and collecting bugs. He was in K because he had been scheduled for some fights here,
looking for a way to climb back up the rankings, but he had lost his punch, and ended up
abandoned by his manager and without any money to return to the States. He made
enough pennies working at the gym to pay his rent, and began working with some of the
boys off the streets. It wasnt until he caught the eye of one of the philanthropists who
supported the local school for boys that anyone knew OBrien had an education and
could instruct in the basic sciences.
And so I got this teaching job here at this school, he said, and as much time at the
gym as I want. Not a bad life, eh? Not bad at all, but it aint cuz of boxing.
He loved boxing, OBrien did , but he loved science more, and in me I think he
found a kind of protg.

42

Look closely at nature, he said, and you can see where language had to originate,
you see where and how we came to grasp our first words, our first sentences. Because in
nature God created a signature in each and every thing, each stone, plant or animal has a
signature that is unique to it yet at the same time is similar to and connects it with all
others
We had just completed a work out at the gym, there was little ventilation in the
dressing room and so both of us were soaked with sweat. OBriens red hair was wet and
dark around his eyes, and as he undressed I could see the sweat course down his chest
and arms in rivulets.
these things are a testimony, an authority that we must read, nature is our
evidence, but only if we understand what is written in its patterns
I could not help but admire his body, it was solid, so perfect, so much like
Cellinis Peruses which we had studied in humanities, yet here it was personified in this
boxers flesh, rippled with strength, bursting and coursed with life. While I, what was I? I
had an image of myself as solid, yet looking down at myself, I saw but Donatellos
David, smooth and soft.
and so when you as an observer of the world began to understand these
signatures, begin to see them and even speak with them, then you begin to see what god
has written in the stars, in the skies and in all the things here on earth
In that hot room, on that day I saw clearly the difference between manhood and
boyhood, the solidity and form of a man versus the lithe, near womanliness of a boy. I
was suddenly embarrassed to remove any more of my clothes.
and we can find order out of anything even destruction.

43

Immediately, right now, I wanted to grow older, I wanted to fill out that promise, I
wanted to feel weight of manhood, the strength and mass that was so incredibly displayed
in OBriens naked body. I could only try to cover up my shame.
Back at school I would look at these insect collections for hours, comparing not
only the shapes and legs and antennae, not only seeking out the signatures and the songs,
but thinking about this man, a fighter who had the delicacy of mind to be captivated by
the beauty of bugs and in their carapaces glimmed a distant message. Here was a man
who indeed found order in the beetles he impaled on pins, order from of the destruction
he wracked upon others in the ring, order even from the ruin his own life seemed to pile
upon him.
One day after school, he walked with me for a ways as I headed home.
You got a rare gift, he said to me, and its not just your boxing fella! You got a
mind for things, maths in particular. It comes naturally to you and it can take you far you
know. We live in a time when science seems to offer more hope than God. But just like
you can use your fists to hurt somebody, so you can do damage with the things that
science gives you. We are seeing it more and more now, you know. Just like you
understand what power you got in them hands, you got to understand what power you got
in your head. Both can hurt people.
I did not understand this idea of a gift. I understood the size and strength of my
fathers hands, I understood the blur of speed with which OBrien attacked the bag, but
not this gift OBrien was talking about. My mind seemed slow, weak, a dull target to be
knocked down easily. Nor could I for the world comprehend the second part of his
message. Yet, this was a lesson that I accepted, perhaps because I did not understand it.

44

Within a few years, I had not only won my first legitimate boxing matches, gloves and
all, but I had finished school with decent enough grades to earn a scholarship to the
university, a prospect that scared me far more than any fight. On my last day of school,
OBrien told me he was leaving as well.
Back to Philly, he said, back to where I came from. Thats if shell even take me,
that is!
He handed me a pair of old gloves.
These here were mine, the ones I wore when I won the Championship in 04, he
said. Im giving them to you so that you never feel like you have to win a pair of your
own. You aint a bad fighter, but your mind is your best bet.
* * *

45

Youth, I remember, confronted opened doorways as if they were of impenetrable

substance not forgettable space. I paused before this nothingness, a threshold I assumed
could not be crossed. Not until it had a name. Later, I felt my gaze return from a window
pane, never venturing any further than the glass, sizing measurements to be compared
with others. Afraid of what was within.

I was a youth when the killings began.

I paused before this nothingness, this door, this window.

I was too young to have a past.

* * *

46

Dr. Z walked from one side of the pulpit to another, surveying his vast opus.
My initial inspiration which led to the building of the Oscillator, he began, came
one day when I happened upon the once repressed works of an obscure 13th century
Benedictine monk. He too shared my idea, only he had the will power and discipline
any maybe a slight affliction to attempt a resolution of these unsolvable problems on his
own. This monk had taken it upon himself to use his only time on earth to try to solve an
equation he believed would determine which souls would reach heaven. This algorithm,
which if you solved it for a certain set of parameters, created one of two results, either it
gave you a number that you could plot on a graph or it gave you a sequence that stretched
out to infinity. The monk believed that those numbers that escaped to infinity were the
souls dispatched to Hell, and so these could be ignored, while those that were defined by
a number and caught in an orbit as he described these souls were accepted into Heaven
and those he plotted on his graph.
He spent nine years, nearly one quarter of his adult life, completing millions of
calculations, toiling on this equation which we would today recognize as similar to
mathematical expressions that represent the life cycles of moths, the swimming patterns
of fish and, most important to me, fluctuations in terrestrial convection currents. The
final answer to his equation for souls, after nearly a decade of painstaking calculations,
when plotted out on paper, created a strange and unusual pattern with remarkable power.
He believed this pattern signified the godhead or even God himself. Other monks

47

immediately differed with him and argued the plot represented the Devil because only
souls could go off to infinity, while Hell was as definite as this earth. In other words, like
many geniuses who look at things a little differently than their peers, the monk was
accused of being heretical and a practitioner of the black arts. With that his work was
taken way from him, it was suppressed, but luckily for us, it was not destroyed. Only
recently have his works been uncovered and made available to be appreciated for what
they are.
What this monks story told me was that there were patterns behind many of the
things that look too complex, even chaotic to us, and that all we need to solve these
previously unsolvable problems was the time to perform the calculations. Of course, I did
not have time myself to spend nine years on each problem. I had graduate students, but
only a handful, how could that help? We were still looking at years to solve a single
problem and if I wanted to know the weather next week, this did me no good at all.
It came down to people, resources. If I used say 64,000 people, I figured I could
have an answer in as little as nine hours, and if so, our predictions could always stay
ahead of our weather. Imagine, a mans nine years of labor reduced down to as many
hours. I can only picture how that poor monk would weep from the realization that what
he had done could be accomplished in so little time. And those fantasies were the humble
beginnings of what would become the Oscillator. Now there to here, he said with a sweep
of his hand, is another story. Just selling this idea to the government was a feat. But
there was no where else to go for support. As you can imagine this project required
massive capital investment. And people how does one get 64,000 people to participate
in this kind of activity without the government? I had nothing but my reputation to back

48

this grandiose idea, nothing but my guarantee that it would work. You can say I bet
everything on a compulsive monks unoffered promise. Back at the beginning, just like
this monk, I had no idea what results my idea would generate, so I simply called it the
Dome, it was a vast computing machine made up of human problem solvers. Only later
would I discover not only the incredible powers of this system but also the equally
marvelous patterns that when I saw them come to light gave me a feeling no less
rapturous than what the monk must have felt six hundred years ago when he finished his
plot of Gods image.
* * *

49

The new artists had said that anatomy no longer really existed in art, the artist had
to assassinate his victim, as scientifically and methodically as a surgeon, their techniques
described as cutting, slicing and disfiguring their subjects, breaking, severing and
relocating arms and legs, tearing the features from the face, laying nose, eyes and lips
asunder, rearranging the human anatomy so as to create an effect of seeing something
from different perspectives, simultaneously at different times, not only from below but
from above, not only from the outside but from the inside.

The 1887 murder of a prostitute found in a single bed in the slums of K was
described in the same way.

The term physician meant scientist to Diderot and Apollonaire, meaning someone
who studies and understands Nature, often by taking it apart.

* * *

50

To my surprise, I actually did well in my university studies. In fact, I performed

rather brilliantly in my early classes, especially mathematics, quickly advancing to higher
level studies. Strangely though, as the classes introduced deeper, more complex topics, I
began to feel detached from the answers that came to my head Every step was suddenly
a struggle. I consistently earned the highest marks in my classes, I was awarded honors
and invited to attend graduate seminars in my first year. I could stand at the backboard
and draft from memory the most detailed proofs and theorems. I was told by some of the
faculty that I was indeed gifted. Yet I did not understand what I was doing. I did not
work through a problem, its solution simply came to me in the most discomforting way,
as if wrestled from a source outside of my brain. I felt as if I found answers in my sleep,
derived from terrible dreams, nightmares actually, even though I was wide awake. Can it
be called knowledge if you dont understand its source? Werent knowledge and
understanding supposed to be pleasing acquisitions?
I was a boy from the docks, not a boy of privilege like my other classmates. They
seemed nonplussed by success or failure. For most of them, school was more a burden, a
tedious sentencing that was tolerated at best. I did not talk like them, I was not built or
physically composed like them. Their hands were smooth and delicate. They soared
easily with their practiced articulation in literature and mathematics, while I trudged and
toiled and sweated on every exercise and exam. I knew I was different and was certain

51

that there was something wrong with me. I did not feel I could keep going on this way,
that I was a sham of sorts. Deep down I was sure that someday I would be found out,
someone would discover that I was not brilliant, that I was not a genius.
During my second year at the university, I still had no friends and I didnt go to
any lengths to gain any. I shared a room at a dormitory with three other fellow students,
but the proximity did not translate into any other form of closeness. If I did not sleep in
the library, I stayed there until my roommates were long asleep. In the morning I was up
before any of them. Besides I was afraid they would ask me to go with them to supper or
some other place, and I rarely had money for things like that. It wasnt until
companionship was forced upon me that I found a friend.
It was in my second year French class that I met Joseph, a tall lanky and rather
peculiar fellow with dark hair and bold but gloomy eyes, who would change all this.
Joseph sat next to me on the first day of class. I, like everyone else in the classroom,
could not help but notice his purple velvet jacket and striped pants. He began speaking to
me in French.
Im sorry, I said, but I dont speak French very well.
Tu ne parles pas francias? He said. Bien sur, tu peut. Cest plus facile!
Sorry, I said.
But he wouldnt stop. Each day of our class he would come in and sit next to me.
Bonjour! He would sing out to me.
Good morning, I would answer.
Bonjour! Tu me dis bonjour.
On the third or fourth day, I finally answered: Bonjour.

52

Joseph smiled but I simply wished him to leave. Only by his daily persistence did
we eventually begin to talk. Joseph was from Italy and spoke that language fluently. He
was studying French, which he already knew quite well, so that he could go work in
Paris, where he wanted to be an architect.
It is too gloomy in K to be an architect. The buildings I want to build need to be
seen in the sun! he said bracelets jangling on his wrists as he drew his vision in the sky.
They need to radiate and shine for everyone to see, not drown beneath this murky,
melancholy sky.
Well, that is what he told me the first time we ate lunch together after class. Have
you ever been to Paree? he asked me. No I said, I have never been outside of K. Ah!
Mon dieu! he cried, so that is why you are so gloomy, you are as gloomy as this sky. We
must get you to Paree.
On another day, he said he wanted to be a dancer. To prove his ambition, he lifted
his body into a dramatic pose and then fluidly sashayed past several other students, his
legs darting, his arms tracing circles around his body. At his height, which he even
managed to exaggerate by holding himself impossibly straight, and with a wardrobe
pilfered from churches, cloak rooms and tea shops, he was a known entity on campus.
One day I noticed he was receiving some derogatory looks from some of the other boys
for wearing a womans fur coat he had found, as he said, abandoned. Someone threw a
piece of eaten fruit which struck Joseph in the leg. He stopped and turned in the direction
of the several boys.
If you must heeeeave your fruit, he shouted, toss me then a pomegranate if you
will.

53

A few of the boys started to snicker.

Any fruit is fruit for a fruit, one of the boys stepped forward and said. The others
laughed behind him.
I am sure you would agree, Joseph said, that there is nothing more beautiful than a
pomegranate. The only fruit suitable for sweet Marys hand. Slice it open, there it is all
like a monkeys brain. Those bloody pearls of succulence. How they roll upon the
tongue!
He grabbed a banana from someones lunch.
Yet there is nothing more perfectly shaped than a fig.
The boys backed away, afraid that he might toss it.
Hes getting a bit cocky with that fruit, a boy shouted. The others laughed again.
Cocked perhaps, but not cocky! Joseph roared. He then thrust the banana between
his legs and held out his hands. And whose queer fruit is this? Is it yours? Yours? Come
claim it while it is still ripe!
The hecklers dropped their smiles and walked off, mumblings of queer echoing in
their departure.
Some of these people dont like that you can do what ever you want, I said after
the boys had gone.
They dont do they? he answered as he peeled down the banana skin. Goes to
show, the only problem with free will is its cost! In this case, the cost of cleaning my
pants. Lets console ourselves with lunch.
And he handed me a piece of the fruit.

54

Whatever he wanted to be, whatever he thought himself to be, Joseph was an

artist and I had never met anyone like him. He not only drew constantly in his
notebooks, on his papers, into the dirt on the ground, but he always asked me to join him.
Here, he would say handing me his pencil, draw my hand. Dont think of it as a
hand, think of it as lines, simply draw the lines, not my hand.
I was ashamed at how little talent and experience I had, and for more than a year
Joseph would push me to look past this embarrassment whether it was drawing, speaking
French, discussing art and philosophy or arguing about politics and religion, often tedious
and circuitous discussions -- he described himself one evening as an Anarchist who
believed in the miracles of Catholicism while at his core he was more Buddhist than
anything. One day he had come across a pamphlet of Petr Kropotkin, and with this
fluttering in his hands like an excited bird, he danced across the campus green, shouting
to me, I have discovered a man coming out of Russia with the soul of Christ!
Joseph was always taking claim for discoveries of other men and ideas as if he
had truly been the first to find them, and in a way perhaps he had. We sat down in the
grass and he read it to me, immediately I understood that this Kropotkin was a man of
science but with a heart for his people. I had never heard such words written for such a
purpose.
For the first time in my life, Joseph said, I can not decide what kind of man this is.
Every man has an essence. Is he a saint? A revolutionary? A scientist?
And who do you think you are? I asked.
Deep down I am all men, like him, he said, as all men should be.

55

As much as he loved to talk and as much as he felt only his ideas had merit, he
would never allow a conversation to proceed without my opinion, my input. He was
nothing but a collection of contradictions, there was no way to predict where his position
would take a discussion or where it would eventually end. He would set me up to attack
and even ridicule me. I was not accustomed to the art or mechanics of discussion and
still viewed conflict as something to resolve with ones fists. At times, he drove me to
anger, but when I was most disturbed, he would suddenly smile at me, put his long arm
around me and give me an embrace.
Life is too important, he once said, to be so serious about it.
Joseph was the first person I had ever met with whom violence was not even a
possibility. I was forced to submerge those raging emotions and deal with him with my
mind. I told him about the demons I felt were behind my success as a mathematician. He
laughed and told me that all genius was pursued by demons, that I should feel lucky,
blessed. He was my first true friend.
Out of my time with Joseph, his unending curiosity, his unfathomable energy and
contagious flamboyance, a new world opened up to me. Joseph was a year older than me
and so he had his own room in the dormitory. It was small and barely provided enough
room for his bed and a small dresser. His bed was covered with a rich velvet cloth and
some delicate embroideries. An Asian vase on this small table held a brilliant peacock
feather.
You need some knick knacks, I said to him the first time I came to his room.
Exactly, he sneered and I could tell I had touched a nerve of his. We have
completely lost our sense of space with our bric-a-brac and knick knacks as you say.

56

Walk into anyones home and what bombards you but mementos, bird cages, aquariums,
photographs, ornate picture frames of cheap reproductions by artists they dont even
know, all kinds of moldings, wainscotings, faux bois, drapes and hideously over stuffed
furniture. We have a horror of the void is what we have. And so we fill it, every inch of
it with the most motley collection of garbage and colors. Beginning with the cave men
who painted on their walls human culture has been a devolution all the way to what we
have now. I will show them the beauty and primacy of space. I will create an architecture
that responds to space and makes us all feel ashamed for painting flowers and trellises on
our walls. I will create space as God created space.
I was indeed sorry for my comment, but silence seemed the only answer.
On the wall above his bed was a drawing he made with charcoal, a swirling of
long knives and clenched fists and tangles of hair, a mans head in the midst of this
violence, three rays of light drawn to broken clouds above. It was St. John the Baptist, he
told me, as he was being beheaded by King Herod. During winter months and rainy days,
we came here to his room to read from his favorite Italian poets, Dante and Boccaccio.
We debated the works Francis of Assisi and Thomas Aquinas. We read the work of the
French writers Rimbaud and Verlaine. He introduced me to poets in my own country,
Wilde and Yeats. He invited me to his classes where he engaged with others on issues of
aesthetics and beauty.
St. Thomas objected to glamour, Joseph was arguing one day in front of his
classmates, he called it the stigmata of true art. So I say lets wear our chancres proudly,
will we! As glamour is the only thing an artist can truly strive for, if he strives for
anything.

57

Thomas was right, one of his fellow students argued back, art for arts sake is a
bastard of time and man.
So for what sake is art? Joseph asked.
To uphold our values, of course, the student answered, to bear witness to history,
to seek articulation of perception and establish truth...
If so, Joseph interrupted, then it is all for the sake of nothing.
Nothing? So you say history is nothing? Values nothing? Perception is nothing?
Nothing, nothing and more nothing. Joseph answered again. When you break up a
piece of art, what do you get? Perhaps you pluck out its idea, which will soon be
embarrassingly extinct. You may tear out its value to society, which will even more
quickly be forgotten. Do you ever grasp hold of anything of the past or the present? Not
if the artist is any good. The fact is, after you have torn and pulled it all apart, all you are
left with is this thing called glamour, beauty in and of its self. All else evaporates if not
in a year, then in ten years. If not in ten then a hundred.
Your point is? one of the defeated students sighed.
If not for glamour art would be useless. And yet compared to science or history,
art is the most useless discipline of all, Joseph said, it serves no purpose, has no role in
life for that matter. Perhaps its only role is to make poverty acceptable and insanity
fashionable. And tell me, when was the last time any king went to war over art?
Several students laughed.
Then you are fine with being a hypocrite? the student defeated sneered.

58

I am nothing of the sort. I would be the last to believe in what I do and even less
likely to believe in what I say. You are the one who wastes time debating what warrants
no debate. And worst of all, you believe it all!
He held court amongst even the older students, and sometimes I felt embarrassed
by his performances as it seemed he was showing off for my sake. Yet never did I see
anyone get the best of him, even if his ideas seemed to vary day to day, conversation to
conversation.
Some evenings we bought the cheapest seats to see Shakespeare, where we
annoyed the other patrons with our running, usually irreverent commentaries.
Seriousness, he whispered to me, is the refuge of the shallow. He took me to galleries, to
student art shows, we went to cafes and public houses where people gathered to talk
about art and global politics, not about cricket and fights.
We were both poor and food was often an issue. The largest bores, Joseph said,
are the ones who live within their means. Many times I followed his lead as we pushed
our way into private parties at the homes of the wealthy, or banquets set up for dancers
after their performance. The first time I found myself in the midst of one of these
gatherings, I asked Joseph:
Do you know any of these people?
Of course not, he would answer, but they dont know that.
This seems wrong, I said, does it not?
Every saint has a past, he said, while we sinners each claim a future.
One day he came to me with a poem by Mallarme, Un coup de ds. He said the
power of this poem was in its sounds, and asked me to listen. I did for awhile, then

59

stopped him and asked him to translate some of the poem. He began to translate but
struggled. I could not understand a thing and so finally stopped him and asked him why
he liked this man so much when so little could be comprehended in his dreamy words.
There is a revolution brewing in these words, Joseph said. He is not simply
changing how we think of words, it is his aim to explain how the mind works. It is not
dreamy at all, but done with murderous seriousness. His words are a knife that splits us
open and shows us how we think.
The two of us could not have been more different in demeanor or in physique.
Joseph was tall and sinewy, yet lithe and graceful, he moved his body with a feminine
grace yet attacked the world with a mans vengeance, all the while caressing what he saw
with great gentleness, always aware of its curves, shadows and mysterious nuances. I
was a boy born and molded from coarser stock, my body solid, my hands rough and
hardened by work and by fights. I had broken yellow nails and large calluses that he
would stroke with his fingers whispering a devotion to what he called the evidence of
lifes harsh cruelty in my hands. In his face were the eyes of a fallen angel, dark, piercing,
full of an unremitting radiance. I had never looked upon such beauty in a man.

* * *

60

You look at this now, Dr. Z continued directing me back to the sea of human
beings below us, it seems like such an orderly state of affairs out there, doesnt it? You
should have seen us years ago at the beginning. It was a completely different affair. The
original idea was very simple. Give each of the computors a piece of the problem and let
each one turn in their answer, their piece. A binder, you can see them in their blue jackets
down there, would bind the answer from one computor with the others in a group of
computors and then another binder would bind the answers from one group with another
group of binders and so on until we had a single answer. We tried this seemingly simple
and orderly process several times. And each time the same thing happened.
It would start off fine, everything working orderly and as planned, but invariably
at some point in the process a kind of turbulence would set in, a disruption that would
grow and continue growing until eventually disaster rocked the entire system. That was
how we came up with the bullhorns. Originally the bullhorns were implemented to stop
the process if necessary, stop it from boiling over into mayhem. We dont know why this
was. We tried building walls around groups of computors thinking that there might be an
underlying competition among groups taking place leading to this chaos. That didnt
work. We tried putting in more binders, less binders, but still the same results. We took
away their coffee, put in kegs of beer, cooled the place down, heated it up, still the same
thing would happen each time: a chaotic catastrophe.

61

Then one day, we had started the process anew with some new measures in place,
I dont even remember what those measures were exactly, and were growing cautiously
hopeful as the length of time without a disturbance surpassed all our previous trials. We
thought we had finally found the right organization and initial conditions for the
Oscillator to work. But are hopes were not for long. Once again, it began in small areas
far from each other, small roils, you could see them by looking out, little dust devils
emerging on their own. These storms would begin to move, spiraling through the
Oscillator, others began to form and soon we had a full blown storm again. The problem
was, this time we had let it go too far and too long, we could not stop it. You could not
hear the bullhorns above the noise of the storm itself. We tried to get the highest binders
to stop the processing, but they were helpless against the maelstrom that now took over.
We literally feared for our lives as the roof began to shake and threatened to come
collapsing in. Realizing there was nothing we could do, we took to our horses and
bicycles, warned as many people as possible but the horrendous noise had already created
a panic in the city, and we headed away from the Oscillator as fast was we could. The
roar that now emanated from that place was deafening, in fact it seemed to grow louder
the faster we rode away as if trying to reach out and grab us, pull us back. We feared a
huge explosion was going to soon send all of our work into the atmosphere, we kept
looking skyward for a sign that bodies and timber would be raining down upon us.
The turmoil continued for hours, at times seeming to die down, only to flare up
again, often more violent than before. We dismounted a few miles away, feeling like a
bunch of cowards but not knowing what to do. There were 64,000 human beings down
there, perhaps destroying themselves, and we were the cause of this. Then we woke up.

62

Literally woke up that is. At some point in all this, perhaps drained by the lack of sleep
we had suffered creating the Dome and the stress of the last several hours, we all, each of
us, fell asleep after we had ridden to safety. Together we woke up. And there was nothing
but silence. What had happened? Had they killed each other? Destroyed the town?
Almost afraid to look we gathered ourselves together and peered down into the valley.
Indeed there was the Dome, completely intact. The town was intact. But all was silent.
Dead. We had to return.
As we rode closer we began to hear something, a humming sound. We stopped so
we could listen more closely. There was indeed a wavering but steady hum of noise
coming from the Dome. It was in fact still alive. We rushed down here and climbed back
to the observation tower, each one of us in complete awe of the sight below us. The
computors were not only alive and well, they seemed to be flourishing. They were active
and busy, communicating with each other, the activity swirling gracefully through the
crowd, separate dances that seemed to come together at times, small flurries of activity
surrounded by larger ebbs and flows, the entire Dome was a huge living mass of people
joined by various rhythms and oscillations. The beauty of all this was breathtaking and
emotional to say the least. Through some process unknown to any of us, the Dome has
worked its way through a dangerous period of chaos and imbalance, somehow had found
an equilibrium of sorts, but not quite as there were still shudders and brief periods where
it seemed that once again an outbreak would occur, but this was quelled by some inner
mechanism. The entire Dome seemed to be hovering just at the point between chaos and
order, balanced by its own means in a state of extraordinary energy, yet efficiently
operating all the same.

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But it soon occurred to us, what was the reason for this activity? It was being
generated from within, with little if any input from the outside. What was the source, the
basis to this organization? And what would happen if the outside world intruded? We
took a question and introduced it to the system. Nothing happened at first, but within
seconds a burst of activity arose, shouts broke out, the entire noise level of the Dome
seemed to rise in pitch and volume, higher and higher, pulses leaped across the surface
and waves rolled back and forth. It was amazing! It was as though the Dome had been
asleep and now with a perturbation from the outside we had awakened it. Someone
shouted that maybe we had reignited the same tremors that nearly brought everything
down the first time, but somehow I didnt think so and I was right. The noise increased
dramatically, the humming and shouting and clamor became almost deafening, but it was
a different set of patterns, it had an order, a synchrony, a stability that while it hovered on
the cusp of chaos never ventured far past that point without returning. Within minutes the
answer came back. We had succeeded. An answer created by the rhythm of coordinated
oscillations. Hence its name.
Dr. Z looked out over the sight below us with an expression that seemed wistful,
sad. The noise was as deafening as the smell was stifling. We shouted at each other to be
heard. I struggled with this, while Dr. Z seemed to have adapted during his time here (did
he ever leave?) and spoke with a loud even voice that easily rose above the squall down
below. I now found the noise, while still loud and intimidating, strangely comforting, it
was not musical in any noticeable way, but had a rhythm, a set of rhythms that seemed to
affect your body in different ways. Some rhythms made the hairs on your skin dance,
while others found a resonance inside your ear. Still others, deeper and seemingly

64

beyond the capacity of your ear to hear, vibrated deep in your inner organs, along your
bones. After a while, I actually began to feel as if my body had betrayed my remaining
skepticism and had found the exact pitches and natural rhythms of the Oscillator and I
was in fact being lulled into its depths.
And yet the reason today I know the Oscillator works, Dr. Z continued, is not
based on any results we have obtained, which by themselves are quite impressive and
sufficiently validating, but that the people here are content beyond my wildest
expectations. At the beginning I had joked with myself that in order to pull this off I
would have to find 64,000 slaves and chain them to their desks in order to carry this out
for any period of time whatsoever. To my astonishment really, the people, even the
reluctant ones, eventually take on a role within their groups, and eventually being within
the whole seems to be more important to them than life itself. Hence the odor you smell,
it really is the odor of humanness. We are not an odorless species. To the contrary, we
have the most obnoxious and repulsive odor of all animals. This was thought to be
because we needed something to make up for our defenselessness to predators. So that
we could actually live with our malodor, our olfactory organs were drastically reduced by
the same evolutionary forces that engorged our stink glands. Yet I believe this odor is also
a means of communication and bonding that we share with each other, one that is never
used nowadays, but one that is completely apparent here in the Oscillator.
As I listened to this man, I was beginning to feel overwhelmed. There appeared to
be no end in sight to what he somehow felt he had to tell me. I could not possibly
understand or take it all in, nor did I really care. I was beginning to feel trapped beneath
this flow of information. This feeling of panic grew as I realized that Dr. Z truly seemed

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to be all alone, he had no peers, no assistants, the telephone never rang, the telegraph
never moved, he did not seem to want or need to communicate with any one. And yet
here he was pouring forth all he knew to me, a stranger, a lowly math tutor from the far
side of town.
* * *

66

During my second year at the university, a profound change came over me. I was
not doing as well in my core classes, but well enough to maintain my scholarship. My
grades dropped as I was spending nearly every day with Joseph and eventually I too
found the desire to absorb what was both beautiful and mysterious in the world, activities
preferable to schoolwork. No topic, no object, no event was beyond our scrutiny and
dissection. Joseph ordered me to write down my ideas, we must publish and publish our
ideas together! I had taken to writing less academic and more speculative letters on a
wide range of topics. I could not follow Joseph with his sweeping and poetic expositions
on all things spiritual and artistic, and to keep myself anchored always relied on sciences
to base my observations and arguments. All the same, I developed a love and skill in
exposition that would serve me on many empty days and nights, stories and poems,
thoughts and fragments I kept to myself.
One of our endless fascinations was with other human beings. We examined
people in the most minute detail from the marks on their faces to the way they carried
their proportions as they walked. These analyses often came down to talk about us. I
asked Joseph if it did not bother him that so many of the other boys at the university were
of such comfortable means. We were like two peasants amidst nobility. He scoffed.
We are all in the same gutter, he said, only some of us are looking at the stars.
We praised the architecture of the simplest buildings finding rules of humanity in
plain brick and straight walls, while criticizing the hopeless ideals evident in the excesses
of the most magnificent structures. We found something to discuss in the shadows late in

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the evenings and in the waters by the river. I began to see things I had never imagined
existed before. As Joseph said, the true mysteries of the world are what we can see, not
what we cant see.
Joseph had created a philosophy for himself, one that he offered to me, but I am
not sure if he cared if I came along or not. Life was art, he said, it is about beauty, and as
beauty was brought forward from art, life too was to be lived as art, from beginning to
end. There was no meaning to this, none that we could see. It was what it was, true and
meaningless all the same. He had so little time and tolerance for the politics and other
trivialities that consumed everyone else. His day was complete if he found one thing of
beauty that he could uphold as unique and eternal. He was self centered, narcissistic, cold
and completely immalleable. Art is the purest form of individualism the world has ever
known, he said. Yet he was also the gentlest, most intelligent and open person I had ever
met.
The truth was, in my inner fibers I was a mathematician and in his Joseph was an
artist. That seemed to be a difference between us that would never change. Yet there
were attempts on both our parts to reconcile this difference, perhaps even close the
distance a bit. He began to study structures in architecture and so found my world of
mathematics to be a thing of beauty in and of itself. I began to take studies in sociology
and philosophy, trying to stay as near as possible to my strengths with numbers and
statistics, but finding new areas that seemed devoid of calculation and measurement,
discoveries that created in me a passionate response I am sure I shared with this maniacal
friend of mine. In between our different perspectives, we shared many things. I learned
to look at ripples and currents in the river in ways that opened a new world. Similarly

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through his help I saw patterns in trees, shapes and structures in broken stones, through
him I discovered ideas about perception and speech and music that would not be found in
any book yet written in this world. I wrote more and more and even began to share some
of these with Joseph who found them brilliant. But never without need for improvement.
Like this one, he said, you write:
Weather. How many times in our lives have we truly wondered about the clouds,
the beauty of a sunset or a blizzard in winter, raindrops and snowflakes, the nothingness
of air that bends trees and moves ships across the sea? If you are like me, you can
probably count those moments of reflection on one hand, if you can remember back to
your childhood.
It is beautiful, you are correct, we never think about the weather in terms of its
cause, only its effect. With weather the path from the past to the present is cut off from
us the future forever unknown. But you are missing something here in these words you
wrote, you need to show not how these are ideas, but how they are words. Do you
understand? Weather came before ideas, but maybe you can find understanding in words
themselves, words that are more gestures than concepts, more grunts than poems. As you
say, like a child would think.
I continued to box, but often I felt these hours in the gym were spent only to make
sure I had one aspect of myself remaining from before, one piece of me that did not
vanish in all this other change. I could not accept Josephs natural passion for religion, it
did not fit with me. Yet, OBriens earlier words to me now began to make sense, and so
while I enthusiastically pursued my science and math studies, I prepared room for
something more, something larger.

69

At the end of the school year, I stayed on at the university to take classes during
the vacation while Joseph returned to Italy to tend to an ill mother. That illness led to her
death which tragically led to the breakdown of his father. Joseph was never to return to
the school, and I would never know what happened to his aspirations to be a dancer, an
architect, an artist and a priest. His passion for this and all of life was too strong, too
burning to be squelched by any misfortune, of that I was certain.
We wrote to each other for several months after that summer. He began by writing
long dissertations about the books he was reading in his spare time, accompanied by
drawings for churches and museums that would one day rise beneath the Parisian sun. I
wrote to him about new discoveries I made in mathematics and even sent him some
poems, simple verses that I hoped would last longer and bridge time and distance more
strongly than just letters themselves. But eventually his letters grew shorter, my poems
lost their vitality and then all communication stopped. In one of his last letters he told me
that he would not be going back to school.
Not to worry, he said, school teaches us only how to remember, not how to grow.
* * *

70

The following year at school seemed to be a different environment altogether.

How strange that my perception of what was around me required Josephs presence to be
validated, made substantial. I needed not only his eyes to see with my eyes, his input to
understand what I then saw, his energy to keep my gaze focused, his passion to keep
believing that this was sublime and therefore necessary, but his presence to make it all
centered and worthwhile. Indeed at times I felt that I had been betrayed by Joseph, by his
refusal to return. And yet, even without him I had changed. I could no longer look at
things passively, I had gained a new attitude to look beneath what was apparent, to see
what was not obvious, to find relationships, to connect images with words, to find fault
with the mind and to find flaws with what others had written. The world now was not a
thing of objects and forces that stood ready to be discovered and catalogued, instead it
was a system of flux, of change, of intertwined and vastly connected relationships that
could never be known, never guessed. Man survived in this whorl of confusion only by
virtue of his audacity. Failure to understand was not a fault or travesty, it was part of the
real process, a discovery to be applauded. You could never give up believing you would
find the answer, yet you never despaired no matter how you failed.
Half way through the school year, my father died due to an accident at the docks.
I had not been back to the area where I had grown up for over two years and upon
returning, this section of town looked smaller than I remembered, wetter and completely

71

squalid. The stench was so terrible that I breathed through a kerchief the entire time I
was there. The machines that had crushed my dad had done so with such brutality that
they took away my last chance to look at him before he was buried.
With that loss I suddenly saw that my feelings of betrayal by my friend Joseph
had been selfish and immature. I failed to recognize that he had not wished to stay away
from me, just as my father had not wished to leave me either. I also quickly realized how
young I was in gathering such a sadness around me because of the loss of a single
friendship, when really I needed to prepare for a lifetime of sadness due to losses that
would be far greater and unending. With regards to my father, I struggled to hold on to
what that man had given me, what parts of him were in me. And so without guidance,
facing alone these colossal questions and overwhelming issues, so began my decline.
It was during this time that I and my class mates were to be working on papers
that would allow us to be represented to the Scientific Academy and so begin our careers
as scientists. I was given the problem of calculating how must h drains be cut in a field
of pear moss to remove just the right amount of water. The problem was not in the
percolation of the water through the peat, as this was well know since the time of
Laplace. The issue that transformed this seemingly banal problem into an intellectual one
as that the boundaries around any given region had to be solved without resorting to the
convenient shapes of circles and rectangles as peat bogs certainly did not spread out in
any such fashion. Some mathematicians in Germany had introduced methods for solving
practical problems such as this were not suitable and so I had to create a new approach,
one that was regressive to a time before the invention of calculus but apparently and

72

ironically too new for my professors who told me that submission of this paper, despite
its practical advantages would not be acceptable for submission to the Academy.
My desire to study the practical and the mundane began to wane. My desire to
write and explore boundaries however found life as I put what I had learned from Joseph
into my work. I grew bored in school and developed an irreverent attitude towards my
mentors. My performance in class began to falter except when I set out to challenge and
even ridicule my classmates and professors. Everything and everyone suddenly seemed
absolutely ripe for mockery! I sealed my waning reputation by giving a campus talk not
on peat flows but on Nordau, a Jewish playwright and philosopher, and his idea of the
Jewish Strongman. This position had been made popular with a motion picture short
showing the scantily clad Jewish muscleman Landau flexing his biceps and scrunching
his midsection. I offered a decidedly different take on the Jewish Nordaus racism and I
tried to liven up my discussion by advertising my talk with a full sized poster of the great
Harry Houdini, who was currently performing in K. I said a special performance would
follow the lecture.
In my delivery, I argued that such a character of the Jewish Strongman was not
necessary from the standpoint of social myth or reform, certainly not to the extent of
worshipping the actual living physique of Landau, a man of no intelligence who was
nothing not more than a freak show attraction. Nordaus reasons for this story were
misplaced and ironically anti-Semitic. Indeed, I argued, statistics exposed the truth
behind his belief and prejudice. The Jew was already an arguably superior social class if
you examined statistics such as crime (the lowest imprisonment rate of all religions and
races in nearly a dozen countries), improvement in educational level from one generation

73

to the next, level of indebtedness according to economic class, and rate or divorce,
separation and spousal abuse (lowest of all comparative classes). And so I concluded that
the Jews did not need their Landaus or Houdinis to support a model of the real Jew, and
that Nordau was actually being prejudicial towards his own race in his curiously spurious
use of facts and statistics.
I finished my talk with my special performance. For this, I offered to be shackled
in a milk barrel I had brought up on stage if anyone challenged my conclusions. By
escaping I would demonstrate how I, like Nordau, could be right despite my faulty logic
and poor use of facts. While I fully expected one or two to take me up on this mischief,
to my surprise the entire crowd enthusiastically rose to the offer and I might still be
chained and cuffed had I not dislocated a shoulder during the attempt to squeeze me into
that metal barrel.
After this lecture, I was told by my advisors that I had all but wasted my generous
university scholarship, that I sadly sought to argue and refute rather than to build on the
great ideas of our times. Hence I would never make it as an academician. There were
plenty of places for rebels, but not in K. Their comments lit a torch inside of me that
burned for years: I was not wrong! Years later, my wife would tell me that I was not only
stubborn but that I had shown these people what they would call an unnatural obsession
with Jews, and this is what had bothered them most. I answered her by saying that it was
all the rage these days to seek and define our utopias, which we did by idealizing our
qualities of mankind, creating these qualities out of elements that did not rightfully
belong to man. What would happen if we sought answers to what was best by looking at
real people, by examining those who survived the longest and did so even under the worst

74

conditions? Those who we fantasize about and create out of attributes that have no
earthly existence offer no real world solutions. And those who due to their wealth or
political power live for a short period with no discernible values tell us nothing about life.
She smiled and I realized I had not truly understood her.
My problem as a student was I now saw things I never imagined before. And out
of what I now saw, I sometimes feared. I could not accept the so-called facts of history,
the wisdom of my professors, the dictates of any science. With this rebellion growing
each day within me, my success in school could not last much longer, and halfway
through my third year I was informed that I was no longer eligible for my scholarship. I
was suddenly thrust back in the world I thought I had left forever.

* * *

75

I lived where planks of gray wood and empty gaps between them were the
firmament that saved you from the metallic sea below, bluegrey mirrors, darkwet night of
day.

Eddy, whirlpool, swirl, vortex, whorl

At some point I realized without gaining any true understanding that wind was but
a mathematical equation on which it plotted its own escape.

I counted the planks and peered through to the waters below.

* * *

76

We still had not addressed the issue that brought me to the Oscillator in the first
place: Dr. Zs grandson. But this thought alone kept me in some comfort. The longer he
lectured me, I figured, the greater the compensation I could comfortably ask for my
services. I was now resolved not to accept less than a shilling an hour! My wife would be
exceptionally pleased.
Ah, Dr. Z suddenly exclaimed as first one, then two, then three jars appeared in
the pneumatic tubes. It looks like the answers to your questions have arrived.
Took this long? I joked.
My dear man, it has been but a few minutes since we sent them out. Lets see,
number one. The Aussies.
Cant be true! I exclaimed.
Who knows. But we were defeated by one of our colonies before and we
survived. OK, number two: it says here you have no children. Is that right?
Yes, and you could have sent someone to the Office of Records I suppose. You
could have copies of all our public records here for all I know.
And you could have asked a better question if you really wanted to test the
Oscillator.
Ok, if you did not have my records, how could the Oscillator have known?

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Well, how many people do you think we would have to contact before we found
someone who knew you?
Not that many I suppose, I answered. As a mathematician, and someone who saw
how the much smaller the world had grown with its telephones and telegraphs, motorized
cars and planes, I knew the answer.
Within our group here, five or six at the most. We probably had this answer
within seconds. It takes some time for these air tubes to send the answer skyward you
know. Some answers come back immediately, as you might imagine, others take longer.
A jokester submitted the question a few years ago: how many hairs cover the Queens
body? Perhaps because she has since passed on, it is still making the rounds so to speak.
Thats a touchy one though
How do you know when you have an answer?
We dont know, it knows. When the Oscillator provides an answer then we have
an answer.
And the answer is always correct?
Heavens no, he laughed. Not even close.
But doesnt that defeat the purpose? I asked.
Not even slightly. Our goal is to have an answer, a correct answer may help us
solve a certain problem. An incorrect answer, who knows, may help us better understand
our question.
How about my second question, how many more children will I have?
Dr. Z stared at the piece of paper and then looked away. He found an envelope,
sealed it up inside and slid it into his coat pocket.

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Lets save this for another time. Our time is over for today.
Knowing that my wife wanted as many children as possible, I did not mind the
delay in receiving the answer. I was not prepared to hear that I would have eight or nine
children to take care of when I could not support one.
But wasnt I supposed to tutor your grandson? I asked. I havent even met him.
Suppose he doesnt care for me?
Ah yes, of course, he said. Come this way.
We walked down the stairway and over to the large glass window that looked into
a room with a child sitting at a large desk, diligently working on his homework.
This is Olaf. He is my daughters son. He was brought to my door a few weeks
ago. No one seems to know where his mother is. I lost her long ago.
What happened, I asked.
Not sure. Perhaps the problem was as simple as I did not pay enough attention to
her, perhaps I worked too much, perhaps I simply did not know what to do. I feel like I
tried, but she left, went off with a man she had met, and last I heard they had a son. I
guess that was Olaf here.
We remained standing outside the large panes of glass.
I dont know what to do with the boy, no more than I knew what to do with her.
But I do know he needs help. He has a pulmonary condition. He really should be in the
countryside, the city air is too harsh for him. But at least in here the air is conditioned
and he can breathe with no problems. He will sit there and work like that for hours. All
he cares about are his studies. I would rather he went out and played with the other boys,
but I know that would only bring pain and suffering upon him. I see myself there, but not

79

nearly as confined. I am hoping you can help him and help me. Take on the duties to
work with him on his studies, allow me to be his grandfather. Until I can find a better
solution.
Is he ill? I asked.
His condition is not contagious, so dont worry about that. And he looks worse
that he is. He is a bit frightful when you first look at him. But that will fade as you get to
know him. In that pallid and pocked face you will see a little boy who loves to learn,
whose only way to play is to carry on as madly as possible with numbers and problems.
You are younger, perhaps he will offer you more than he has to me. I hope so. In any
case, thats Olaf. We have run out of time today, but you can meet him next time.
Next time?
Sure, he said. Olaf needs help with his algebra, and wont listen to me. Thinks I
am too old to know anything.
He pulled out his pocket watch and lifted the cover.
My word, he said, look at the time. I have much to do. You will return?
Of course, I said.
Here, he said, you will need this key tomorrow and every day to enter. You dont
use it as a key, simply show it to the security guards, they will recognize it and let you in.
And then take this as well, you wont need it now, but keep it in a safe place.
What is it?
A separate pass. It is a janitors pass actually. In case for any reason they do not
let you in with that key, come to the same entrance off Garrod Street you came to today
and use this pass to get in.

80

I dont understand, why would I need this?

You may very well never need it. Keep it safe, hidden somewhere. Just in case.
Okay, I said, wondering aloud to myself.
Until tomorrow then, he said.

* * *

81

I had a job! But what was my job actually? And what was this air of mystery,
this element of intrigue related to the separate key that I had to keep secreted until
necessary? But did I really care? My wife would be ecstatic but already I could hear the
first question tripping off her jubilant tongue: what were my wages? In all the
strangeness of the day, I hadnt even thought to ask. Perhaps, I thought, I should simply
make up an answer, tell her it would be something modest, say twenty shillings a week,
and if it was more then I could trumpet that I had received a raise! And so quickly! But I
had to allow her to embrace this immediate flood of enthusiasm. Heaven knows, a
chance to rejoice came to her all too rarely.
Although we were not married, I had accepted this woman as my wife out of the
routine that bound us not in dull repetition, but in a remarkable comfort and life-giving
predictability that I had never had before. My wife was a wonderful woman, the absolute
love of my life. Both of us were widowers, and neither had a chance to be blessed with
children. I first married shortly after I entered the university, an arrangement made and
accepted years prior. Tragically, she died only months later, from a cause that was never
to be established. I didnt know her when we were married, I didnt know her when she
died. I was heartbroken, but more for her sake and not mine. I could not dismiss the
irrational feeling that her marriage to me had caused her death, if only because these two
dramatic events were so closely joined in time with no other cause available. Years later,
I did some research into marriages and found out that less than one percent of marriages

82

end within thirty days due to death of a spouse. But of those more than seventy percent
of the deaths were women, I assumed from complications due to childbirth. I was wrong.
Most of these deaths were reported as due to accident. That was in fact what the doctor
wrote on her death certificate. To avoid later complications, he whispered to me. More
than eighty percent of the surviving spouses go on to marry again in less than two years.
It took me longer than that.
If my first marriage had been as coldly determined as night following day, as from
winter then spring, my second marriage was a dark winter night suddenly illumed with an
unforeseen warmth. My present wife came into my life as always happens with love
when you least expect it, least desire it and most of all least deserve it. Before she came
along, I had been falling a long time, at first hoping for a soft place to land, then finally
not caring when the hard cold bottom came rushing up to meet me. She had no business
and even less sense picking me up from where I had put myself. And it would be years
before I ever understood why.
She was a soprano with a clear, radiant voice, filled with tones that could be as
light and playful as they could be quiver with love, angst or sorrow. This I knew from our
first days together. I awoke one morning hearing her sing. I believe she had forgotten
that I was in the apartment, for when I came out so that I could watch her as well as listen
to that beautiful voice, she suddenly stopped and began to act busy with some clothes, as
if embarrassed. Her youth had been filled with dreams of becoming an opera singer and
an actress, a dream equally shared by her mother. But her chance to study at the
esteemed School of Music came to an end when her mother became infirmed, her father
disappeared into his work following the mothers death. For years thereafter she too

83

wandered about alone, refusing to return to her fathers home, turning down any offers of
help, never considering the possibility of remarrying. She sang in the theater and even in
the cabaret, anything, she told me, to keep that part of her alive. But I never heard her
sing again after that one morning.
She believed she had a second chance coming to her, and she was patiently
waiting for that time to come. Never more than in these last several, long and miserable
months had I wondered how she could have chosen me as the purveyor of new
opportunity. For I had let her down in nearly every way. I had been unable to hold onto
any gainful employment, I had squandered what prospects have been presented to me,
and I had dragged my wife down that shameful path where so many of the people in K
descend and never recover.
And so now, knowing this, you might imagine my exhilaration to find I could rush
home as the bearer of such good news. Yet I felt strangely comforted knowing I had such
a long walk home. I wanted to meander through these thoughts myself, not share them
with others in a carriage and no, not even share them with my wife. Not right now. I felt
doubly fortunate at the moment as I had not a single farthing in my pocket, once again
my protection against the stench that taunted me, beckoned me, called me a coward. I put
my head down and walked onward towards home.
Now, with this sudden lift in spirits, I found I could boldly address those thoughts
I had long been afraid to acknowledge. For example, I wondered how different these
years would have been if my wife truly needed me to be her knight, her savior. To be
honest I knew that she actually needed none of this from me. As I continued to struggle
with my life, she had carried on with her own, one that was for the most part invisible to

84

me, a life she seemed determined to build and protect for herself. My role had nothing to
do with bringing her fortune, instead I became more and more of a burden to which she
was ceremoniously yoked. For her sake, she hoped to lessen that burden by making me
more of a man than I was. With great patience she tried to help me find a way to do that.
For years, she accepted each descent our life course took with expressed resignation but
not with a resulting loss of will. With each set back she adjusted her expectations of me;
she pointed me towards goals that were more attainable, goals that became simpler as our
life grew harder. But I knew, at some point, you can no longer hold on to the person who
is about to drown, if they dont help themselves, you have to let go so that your own life
can continue.
The desperation in her eyes on that morning as I was leaving to meet Dr. Z for the
first time had been a look of concern for me, not for her, as if to say if I did not do this,
she could do no more for me. I was falling away, while she remained standing on a
higher perch. Her last bit of strength had been expended. I had to grab on to something
else if I wanted to save myself and save my life with her. And so now, my one chance
was renewed in this job at the Oscillator. And on this day, I vowed to do all I could not to
disappoint her again!
Yet as I made my way back home, I sensed once again the skepticism rising
within me. Was this simply the natural tide of doubt that seemed to flow though my
character? Or was there a basis to these questions now in my mind, the questions of:
How could all of this be? What purpose really?
Perhaps these negative thoughts were aroused because what I had witnessed
inside the Dome today was so different from what I had imagined. Yet who was I to

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entertain such doubts? Who else had ever been afforded the opportunity to climb to that
observation pulpit and see fully what was taking place in the Dome, the Oscillator? What
I had seen would have been impossible to deduce from being on the floor or looking as I
have at the outside of this magnificent building. I was being welcomed into the
Oscillator as if part of its family, one of its race. Perhaps my doubts were about me, not
what I had seen. Perhaps the real question that plagued me and created all this
uncertainty was: Why me?

* * *

86

As someone once said, bizarre cubiques emerged out of a tenuous friendship

between Stein and Picasso that began in 1906.

Picassos Les Demoiselles dAvignon was completed in 1907.

Both artists were interested in primitive cultures, African masks in particular

which recast the human head in various planes and uncommon dimensions. Small eyes
and mouths represent humility. Eyes half shut indicate tranquility. Gertrude and Pablo
also seemed to share the sudden realization that with two eyes we should be able to see
objects from at least two perspectives at any time.

Picasso took this literally.

As for Stein, origins were with the family not atoms, and so she wrote literary
patterns rather than linear sequences.

* * *

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This question, Why me? came naturally to my mind because there had to be a
reason I had been brought into this new position. I did not earn or deserve this job. If I
knew one thing about myself, it was that I was a failure through and through. I was a
failed professor of mathematics. A failed employee. And a failing husband and provider.
I was now into my third decade in life and was well past my prime for making a true
career for myself.
I never actually doubted my capabilities, but I did doubt my ability to find what I
could do and do well to my own benefit. I had had my chances. Upon losing my
university scholarship, one of my professors took pity on me and recommended me for a
job at the Bureau of Statistics. My professor told me some real world experience would
be good for me, that it would help set my perspective for the future. The Bureau was a
gloomy, crowded cavern of men and women seated at long benches in front of long tables
on which piles of ledgers and books and papers were stacked. It was a tedious job, the
only sounds throughout the long days were the hum of the overhead fans and the turning
of paper. The place was a vast repository of information, useless and otherwise, volumes
upon volumes filling shelves that continued deep below the streets surface, catacombs of
knowledge that shared space with ancient caskets and rusted sepulchers.
Perhaps due to my embarrassingly glowing letter of recommendation I
possessed a brilliant mind, great organizational skills, tremendous insight, and the
courage to take on the most difficult problems my assignments were more demanding

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than those I saw handed out to my fellow statisticians. But I enjoyed the challenge,
minor as they were. For example, the question of how many people populated the various
towns in our country would seem to be a simple straightforward exercise incapable of any
surprises. However, I discovered after gathering pages of data that the distribution of
cities by population followed the same pattern as the peaks in our most famous mountain
ridge when arranged by size, or the size of fish pulled from the sea just as I had arranged
them on my mothers cart as a child. Another time I was told to calculate the differences
between the times on the hundreds of city clocks, so as to devise a method to punish poor
time keepers. To my surprise the results were not random as would have been expected
due to the different mechanisms, but clocks were clustered by location suggesting the
rhythms and vibrations sent through the walls served to synchronize adjacent time pieces.
Of greatest interest were the laws of mortality. And they were not looking for
simple measures such as a breakdown according to cause but also by sex, age, marital
status, location and occupation. Such questions entailed legions of new clerks,
enumerators, calculators, printer, paper, trash receptacles. These offices seemed to grow
with the fury of a cyclone sweeping through and taking up room after room, building
after building.
I was applied to the problem of suicide, a topic that was the cause of much debate
between us and Paris, which city had the people most inclined toward this illness, which
was the most suicidal city. Not only were the methods of suicide deemed to be regular
in Paris suicide was done by charcoal or drowning, in K we hung ourselves of used a gun
but so was the seasonal variation. Our continental statisticians assumed that winter was
the cruelest time and so that (in addition to a defective spleen) was what made the K the

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most suicidal of all cities. And so it was argued that most suicides would come in winter
Yet, I was able to show rather quickly that we were the least suicidal of all major cities
and like all cities in Europe the self-sacrificing member of K usually chose summer as the
month of preference, not winter. My work propelled me in the esteem of my superiors.
I was in fact ceremoniously promoted to the Department of Criminality. Crime, of
which there was much debate as to whether suicide belonged as a category of criminal
behavior, was another area of keen interest among bureaucrats and statesmen. Not so
much to find out the patterns and causes of crime, but to shore up and strengthen current
beliefs, for much shorter term purposes. I was asked to create a report on the distribution
of crime through the city of K, and to take great pains to demonstrate its clear and
unequivocal prevalence in the slums. Of course I was sure I knew the answer, but I
began as I always did with these kinds of problems: I collected staggering mounds of data
and from that proceeded to look for patterns. For months I gathered information on a
variety of factors leading to crime: seasonality (most murders were committed in
summer), geology and landscape, birth rate, living conditions (urban poor led the charts),
alcoholism, price of alcohol (I found out that as small as a 10% increase in the tax on
most alcoholic beverages had a remarkable impact on the level of violent crime).
I was able to demonstrate that the number of criminals in K is a nearly always a
constant; and the relative proportions of the different sorts of crimes remain the same
over time as well. In other words, we know in advance how many men and women will
get their hands bloodied with others; how many will be rapists, how any will be forgers,
how many will poison, how many with cheat and steal. I produced these numbers with
the same confidence as our number of births and deaths in K. In fact, I would argue, so

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sure was I of these numbers on criminality that we could create a new budget for the
police and criminality and these numbers would supply that budget to the farthing and
reduce it by the millions.
Except no one cared for my ideas on fiduciary matters, I had been asked to
support the razing of the slums by providing proof of what a breeding ground they were
for thieves and murderers. No one thought of looking at crime rate as a function of
education, but as this seemed to be the fastest way to give people the answer they were
beggaring for (they would demolish the slum shops no matter what I would say!) I
thought to give this a try. I used conscript records and data from the justice of ministry
and looked at K across all its districts. To my surprise my study demonstrated that the
higher the education level of a particular district of K, the higher its crime. The result
nearly horrified me. But the numbers did not lie. To protect myself, I decided to look at
other cities as well. My results were not only valid in K but in Paris and other cities as
well. The recommendation, had I had the nerve to write it, would have been to raze the
most desirable sections of K, home to most of the thieves and murders in our city.
I of course did not put this into my report but I added a few lines that would cause
me great grief. I claimed that if crime was a normal and predictable as any other feature
of human behavior, then perhaps it was a normal and healthy aspect of life. Should the
crime rate fall dramatically that may be as much of a cause of concern as if it rises.
Razing the slums (or mansions) might indeed upset an order that was presently healthy
for our city. My superiors were furious to say the least. For days I wondered if I would
indeed be fired. As it turns out had I not extended my results to these other foreign
municipalities, I probably would have been excused, but my report on Paris would find

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much future use in the constant bickering that took place between the bureaucrats of our
cities.
Instead my bold but unwelcome conclusions seemed to have curried favor with
the Minister of Police, who was keen to see a department of anthropological criminality
implemented in our city. This new scientific approach to categorizing criminals as beings
who shared a less evolved biology than other people was quickly gaining popularity in
other countries following the work of an Italian statistician named Lombroso. Our police
Minister wanted K to be on the same course of scientific modernity as the Italians, and,
most importantly, ahead of the French . And this needed someone who was unafraid,
who would go forth courageously into data. That was me.
Within no time, I was able to corroborate many of the same statistical treatments
linking features of the face and head with inclinations towards criminality, but
Lombrosos passionate conclusions were blatantly Lamarckian and so seemed strangely
anachronistic and, to be honest, convenient. His major finding was that 40% of the
criminal class had atavistic features suggesting a regression to an earlier, lower life form.
Even though I admired Lombrosos empathy towards men and his suggestions for the fair
and rehabilitative treatment of those who seemed innately predisposed to criminal
behavior, and his recommendation that we treat criminals as one would treat the feebleminded or insane, he had biased his own thinking by categorically placing all criminals in
the lower rungs of society, right next to unskilled workers and the physically
disadvantaged. He never applied this study to other, higher classes. Regardless,
Lombrosos claim that criminals shared an irreversible atavism was just what the police
department and the Ministries of Social Welfare needed to justify their legislations to the

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detriment of the unfortunates in these lower classes. The Minister of Police had hoped I
would produce a manual by which to classify the criminal races in K and so
institutionalize their own scientific processing of criminals. However, I demonstrated
quite aptly, at least so I thought, that it made no difference what group, class or
subdivisions of humanity you studied, you would always come up with this number of
40% according to Lombrosos categories and methods. In other words, I concluded that
these same atavistic traits were equally prevalent among members of our royalty and
esteemed gentry. Hence it had no bearing on criminality. My boss however was not
impressed, even going so far as to call my work rubbish. The police Minister was even
more disappointed and employed less graceful language in its review of my study.
I was abruptly assigned to another department, a table in a dusty, airless storage
room with a faded sign: Department of Meteorology, where I was to continue the
compilation of weather patterns with the goal of producing predictions and forecasts for
the Almanac. My boss remarked this was a perfect task for me.
How could anyone screw up the numbers on the rain and snow, he snorted. And if
I was wrong who would care? Everyone knew, my boss exclaimed, that the weather was
basically unpredictable.
As I began this task, I realized I had never thought about the weather before and
with little effort I discovered some interesting correlations of cycles that we took for
granted such as annularity of seasons, the cyclical nature of tides, the fluctuations in
temperature over time, drought and rainfall. I found what basically everyone knew, that
the longer a period of time, the more cyclical most aspects of weather were. But I also
found, with not a little excitement, that no equation was available that could ever

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faithfully represent these climatic patterns as long as we expected them to be perfectly

cyclical. There had been a revived effort of late to create the mathematical descriptions
of meteorological parameters and from this matrix predict these forces, but no set of
equations seemed sufficient to even remotely describe what we knew to have happened in
the past, let alone accurately predict the future. In other words, my observations and
analyses seemed to indicate that weather prediction by numerical analysis was not even
possible. I even went so far as to say it seemed that our weather was heading towards a
kind of chaos in the distant future, leaving the inevitable conclusion to the readers
imagination: apocalypse by weather was inevitable. I published a small monograph on
my results and the minimal number of copies was printed. My boss read the monograph
only after it was printed and to his horror found nothing of value for the Almanac. No
one wants to predict their death by weather, he yelled. Apparently he received a
percentage of sales from these booklets and had hoped I would boost his annual revenues.
From that day on, I was demoted as far as one could go before regressing to the
position of a page. I was put back into the vast room of enterators and given only the
most menial and mundane tasks, creating tables of how many farthings, pennies,
sovereigns and six pence pieces were in circulation; which was more cost effective in the
office soft or hard leaded pencils; what was the cost to the government of the average
piece of litter in K in terms of collection, transport, storage and disposal; the number of
horses in the city, the tonnage of manure deposited and the man hours required to move
it. Tasks that had not purpose or reason other than to create numbers and more numbers.
The fact was, all around us, in these mounds of data, the piles of reports, one thing
and one thing only was clear. Trends in one direction were nearly always followed by a

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trend in the opposite direction. Crime rates one year may go up but the next year they
would fall. Child of tall parents may be tall but rarely taller than their parents. Children
of the highest educated rarely performed as well as their parents. Children born to retards
often did much better. What this said was clear and ominous: the process of development
in man strive towards one thing and one thing only: mediocrity. And amidst all this where
is the free will? With numbers we had reduced talk about man and his actions down to
propensities, penchants, and predetermined states? Is man responsible for what he did?
What future was there for morality?
To be honest, the task I was given did not matter as long as I earned enough
money to drink each night, gamble and court the haggard ladies who, after several shots
of absinthe and a dozen lost card hands, looked as beautiful as any on earth. As with
most government jobs, you could do this one in your sleep, which is how I usually
worked, never taking notice of a beautiful young woman with alabaster skin and red hair
sitting exactly six rows away from me.
* * *

95

[Dr. Z and Oscillator -- Machine and man.]

* * *

96

It was during this period of time that I sleep-worked through my days at the
Statistics Office, during this time I came into the office and fell asleep or came into the
office already asleep, such was my job at the Statistics Office, such was this job that I
could do it while I was sleeping, do it while asleep. It was during this time while I sleep
worked through my days at the Statistics Office that I also had a recurring dream, a dream
I had over and over again while I was asleep. This was a dream that I had over and over
again while I was asleep and also while I was awake it seems. A recurring dream that
cared not if I was awake or asleep, cared not if I was asleep while at work at the Statistics
Office or if I was awake somewhere else. It was the same dream always although slightly
different each time this dream that came upon me, that came to me in a recurring fashion
while I was asleep or awake either while I was at the office or outside the office, always
coming to me in a slightly different form. This dream that came to me while I was
asleep or awake, was always the same dream, although slightly different each time, but
the same dream nonetheless, a dream in which everyone around me had intentions that
were directly opposed to mine. These people who came to me again and again in this
dream in the same but slightly different way each time, this was always a dream about
these people whose intentions were never in accordance with mine. Coming to me again
and again, these people, not always the same people, but often slightly different people

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each time, would come to me with different intentions, intentions that were never the
same as mine and so began to surround me in a threatening manner. Surrounding me,
these people with different intentions came to me in these dreams whether I was awake or
asleep and so they came to me as sometimes the same people often times different people
but always people with different intentions from mine and so I was so surrounded and so
I naturally felt threatened.
It was from this dream that I realized these were the same feelings although
slightly different that had often surrounded me just as these were the same but slightly
different people who surrounded me ands so I had often and forever perhaps harbored
these feelings this feeling of being surrounded and this other feeling of being threatened,
feelings that came to me again and again, sometimes the same feelings sometimes
slightly different feelings, but always with the same effect, the effect that I felt
surrounded and threatened. And so I came to realize that I had always harbored the same
feelings the same fears even though they never seemed as real as they seemed now so real
in fact that they now seemed different even as they seemed the same as the feelings I had
had before, different in that they now seemed stronger and more capable of manifestation
but the same in that they were not unlike the feelings I had of being surrounded and
threatened and so incapable of manifestation. But now the feelings were stronger and it
was now that I felt not only surrounded and threatened but I felt a manifestation of these
feelings, a manifestation that had never been apparent before in these feelings. And so I
suddenly felt not only the same feelings as before but now something different from
before, I not only felt surrounded and threatened, I now discovered that I harbored a deep
but now cleanly palpable hatred of mankind.

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And to this day I am not sure how to describe this anger of mine except that it was
a constant, smoldering rage that I used to define nearly everyone I saw. I had little
control over this phantom, it would rise up any time it wished, dark specific thoughts of
violence that came to my head as if from a source other than my own. These were not the
simple voices of rage and fury I had known through youth, and they could not possibly be
the other voices my father so often spoke to me about. These came from a darker place
than even he, in his deepest ruminations, never fathomed.
I never took out any of this anger on anyone, when these black clouds descended
on my mind I simply imagined upon a passerby or other innocent what I would do: a
cross to the mouth, a clip to the head, breaking some fellows knees, sending another face
first into the ground. Over and over these scenarios played out in my mind, day and
night. Then one day I watched as a man beat a dog in the middle of the street, completing
his task by raising a piece of lumber over the broken animal as it looked up, a single paw
in the air in a final plea for mercy. My eyes blazed over in fury and the next thing I knew
I was standing over this man, his face wrenched in a gaping fear begging me to stop, my
fists bloodied, his mouth, nose and brow darkened with disfigurement. I left him there
lying next to the lifeless dog and wondered what had happened. When the daze left me, I
also realized my rage was gone. At least for a while.
What I had discovered was the opium of fighting, an intoxicant I had never
experienced as a youth. My need for this drug quickly took me into many a basement or
back alley where dozens would wager on the two of us fighters, who drunk and blind
with rage would batter each other senseless. For me getting battered was as good as a
solid drunk, winning or losing didnt matter although I still possessed my skills from

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youth and the cunning I had gained under OBriens tutelage. Id wake up sore but at
least temporarily accepting of my fellow man. I may have lost a tooth or had a profound
ringing in my ears, but I had mercifully gained a few days of relative peace. It was all
about mercy.
I might have ended up a broken, wasted carapace, as would any human being who
subjected their body to such punishment and disrespect, but for one fight that changed
everything. Like most fights all the way back to my youth, this one was set up
spontaneously, probably on a bet between two people I did not even know at the bar. I
was given a few shots of whiskey then led out like a champion into the alley. A large
crowd either cheered me on or spat at me, who or why I did not care. The men leading
my procession then parted halfway down the foggy alley and out of the gloom stepped
my adversary. Bare-chested, with brown hair dampened by sweat, two fiery eyes and all
of about eighteen years to him, it was none other than me that I looked upon! I was in that
alley preparing to battle my own youth!
Completely dumbfounded by the spectacle, I stood there as my youth leaped upon
me with percussive blows to my jaw and neck even before I could raise an arm. My
backers were leaning over into my face, cursing at me with bewilderment to put up my
fists and fight. My youth continued his assault, blows to my gut, my kidneys then again
to my face. With my hands at my sides, my palms open, I looked around and stared back
at the men and women jeering at me with now the most ugly and demonic faces, a beer
bottle flew in like a bat from out of the darkness and struck me in the forehead, blood
poured down into my eyes. I was counting the planks in the wooden road of the docks,
grouping them by the gaps through which I could peer down and see the river water

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running darkly beneath. My youth kept coming. His teeth gleamed in a face that was
half smile, half hate. I saw the white spittle begin to form in his mouth as he delivered
upon me blow after blow. I looked again from side to side at the crowd, some people
were shaking their sweaty quid cheering on my youth to kill me, to do me in, shouting
with the voices of the damned that I was a drunk bastard whod taken every fools money
in the name of a fight. I sat beneath my mothers fish cart trying to coax a cat out of
hiding with a ribbone, the flies buzzing about in great clouds, the piles of seaflesh
growing limp and buttery while women waited in the shadows for the prices to be
lowered on the now rotting remains. And still my youth came at me, his small
undamaged fists, his lithe but powerful arms, his chin bold and free of any scars, his eyes
dark, filled with hate. I saw behind him faces I knew who seemed to be convulsed with
so much ire that blood threatened to spurt from their eyes and bile from their lips, their
rage so severe it seemed their very hair was enflamed. Bottles and cans were being
thrown against my body, I was soaked with their beer and stained with my blood. One
man leaped into the fight pit screaming and threatening to club me with his cosh. I struck
him into a ghastly silence with a single punch. Momentarily interrupted, my youth
backed off then came in again, more cautiously at first but then with slow and careful aim
he began to strike at me, across the jaw, into the nose, full onto my eyes. The crowd
cheered my youth on, they screamed for my demise, hollered for my death, they shouted
with maniacal rage for my youth to snap my neck and crush my empty skull. I waited for
my father to appear across the quay, a huge wooden crate balanced on his head, his neck
like a bulls, his huge frame staggering beneath the weight, the plank wobbling as if
trying to toss him off. My youth stepped back from me, his chest heaving, his neck

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straining, his eyes flashing amidst a young, undamaged face that was splattered with my
old blood, his body taut like a animal, rippled with strength, he had stepped back and
took a small metal bar from someone in the crowd. He kept his eyes on me as if worried
I might flee while he wrapped a metal bar across his knuckles with a rag, tucking the ends
of the rag underneath his fingers, testing the placement and steadiness of the metal on his
fist, raising his bandaged metal fist to the crowd that cheered him feverishly as they
would their savior. I quietly stared at my mother lying on the bed as we waited two days
for the coffin maker, her face changing, growing darker as my father sat and slept in a
chair across the room, his legs jerking in his sleep as if to assure me one parent was still
alive. Putting his arm behind his back, my youth now cocked that fist down low to the
ground, as the crowd shook and slobbered like madmen drowning in their own saliva,
their faces but wadded hate with orifices snorting and glaring and effusing their odium,
he crouched low so as to launch towards me, so as to propel with all his weight and force
that metal fist upon me. I watched the dirt fall on my fathers coffin, a dark cloud that fell
with a sick thud against the wooden box that covered a face I had not seen for over two
years. And then all sound ceased, all light vanished.
I do not remember a thing about the fight itself from that point on. When I awoke
from what seemed to be a strange dream, the young man was being carried away, as limp
as a pile of rags. Someone, a face I knew yet could not recognize at the moment, bent
down over me, handed me several quid and said,
You neednt ave been so ard on im, you know. es just a boy.
I never fought again. Not unless I had to. My rage had been carried away with that
broken reminder of myself, never to return. No one joined me in my victory celebration

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that night, which pleased me just fine. I had enough quid to buy company if I felt so
inclined, but drinking alone felt best.
Then, at some time during one of the foggy, bleary days and nights that followed,
I was pulled from the gutter by a voice that I wanted to believe the first time I heard it, a
voice that spoke to me in a harsh but loving kindness I had not received since my fathers
gentle lectures. The voice of the woman who would become my wife.
When I look back upon that day I see it as one of the rare days when I won a favor
from chance.

* * *

103

It was the end of my first week at the Oscillator, and the awe, the trembling of
excitement that I felt every time I climbed into that pulpit had been quieted somewhat by
a question that had crept into my mind. Why had I been brought here? Clearly not to
tutor as I had not spent a single hour with the child let alone entered the glass room where
it seemed he was perpetually quarantined.
But my doubts were not only about me. No, something was not right. I was
beginning to feel this entire enterprise was something of a farce, this Oscillator a
leviathan of pseudoscience, something that had simply grown too big and monstrous to
stop or even criticize, too much money invested, too many people with too much at stake,
could this be nothing more than the worthless fetish of some demented ego. He had
invited me here, so of course he knew the answers to my questions. I had played right
into his hands asking the most obvious of questions. I was being lured into this travesty,
but what was it and why?
Today as on every day, Dr. Z asked me to follow him. We walked past the closed
glass doors where his grandson always sat studying. We walked along the glass walls
that separated us from the computors, then we climbed the unending spiral staircase that
took us to the observation pulpit. And there Dr. Z pulled me closer to the edge of the
platform as if sensing that I was not in a frame of mind to accept what he was about to
tell me.

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I am imagining that you are wondering what this is all about, he said, why we are
doing this? Who is this we? How and who supports such a massive operation? Does it
indeed actually do anything? Have we maybe created the worlds largest system that
does nothing? I did not expect you to understand it all so quickly. I did not expect you to
accept what you saw. In fact, I counted on your resistance, a healthy does of skepticism
is a good thing!
He sat down on a stool and pulled out a pipe. He lit what tobacco remained in the
bowl and blew a small bluish cloud out into the atmosphere beneath the honeycombed
ceiling.
Rarely does a man get a chance to try something that has no precedent, he said.
To do something of this size and magnitude, and be completely unsure of what the results
might be, well, that requires a perfect storm of circumstances. It requires genius. It
requires dedication. It requires money. More than anything else though, it requires fear.
Thats right. Without fear, so many things would never get done. And the Oscillator is
no different. Fear can keep things from happening, and fear can ensure that some things
will happen. In our case, the entire world was so afraid that they gave us all we needed to
make this happen, to take a chance. The fear being that we may never be able to try this
again.
And it is true! We had no idea if this would work when we began, he continued,
or how it would work. It was a grand experiment, a huge risk. The funders were told it
may be years even longer before we saw any results. No one could have possibly
foreseen what has resulted. Sometimes, early on, I looked down there and saw nothing
more than a mass of ants, writhing about purposelessly, not knowing what to do. Other

105

days it was a huge bowl of human gelatin, just a wiggling mass, no structure, no
organization. But over time, interesting things began to happen. What looked like cells
or small units began to form, all on their own I might say, small pockets of computors
who seemed to work and compute together, but if I had to guess, these cells were defined
pretty much by all who could hear within a certain radius. But these cells were not rigid,
they could overlap with each other, a single computor could be in as many as five or six
or who knows how many cells, yet the cells themselves were all about the same size.
Then you can see that these cells, which are barely apparent to the unaccustomed
eye, seem to communicate with other cells. At times, columns and entire rows of cells
will communicate, carrying information I began to imagine, processing information, and
then delivering it to another column. So you can see a structure develop, whereby at each
level, each individual unit communicates with only unit of its size and dimension: a
person with a person, a cell with a cell, a column with a column, then finally, the entire
entity comes alive. All of this happens very, very fast. Within seconds. And bear in mind
that all of these activities can be processing many different computations at once. Each
individual may have a specific task at any given time, but within a cell, a dozen different
ideas can be processing, within a column thousands of cells can be processing, within a
larger column millions of ideas, and so with the entire system, billions, perhaps trillions.
That is the power of the Oscillator.
So what you have done, I said with a branded tone of skepticism, is create a giant
brain out of a herd of pencil pushers.

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Ha! he replied. A herd of pencil pushers! Thats good. Some mindless animals
corralled down there. That is indeed what they are. Nothing more than pencil pushers. I
must remember that.
He took another puff on his pipe, then continued.
And is it a brain as you say? Let me ask you that question in another way. What
do you understand about the brain that allows you to say the Oscillator could be a brain?
It calculates answers to questions.
Yes. And?
It appears to have a certain level of intelligence.
Yes. And?
Well, it seems to function pretty much on its own as far as I can tell.
Yes. He looked at me with the glare of a knowing father. And?
It seems as if the Oscillator is a living organism of its own, I said.
Brilliant! You are beginning to understand. And so quickly!
I was surprisingly touched by his accolades. So emboldened, I asked, but what
about questions of right and wrong, good and evil? If it were a brain, wouldnt it be able
to answer those kinds of questions as well?
Of course. And as you will see, the Oscillator is not an abacus or calculator, we
are not operating here on the basis of flipping colored beads up and down a wire. The
processing units are human beings, pencil pushers as you say, computors as we call them.
So we can calculate any kind of questions or equation. Ethical questions. Questions
about beauty, about religion, about the future.

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But surely, I said, if you ask it a question such as: What does our benevolent God
look like? this Oscillator which is composed of persons cannot truly answer such a
question.
Would you like to ask it another such question? Do you have one in mind?
Not really.
Perhaps ask the Oscillator if you are a good person? A good husband?
Why would I trust an answer like that to them? I said squinting first at him then
down at the masses.
I suppose I wouldnt if I thought they were mere beasts. And not if I were seeking
truth versus an answer. We only offer answers here. Truth? Who can judge that?
Doesnt time need to factor into an analysis of what is true or not? An answer years ago
on some question may have seemed absolutely true then even if it is absolutely false
today. The earth is flat. The earth is the center of the universe. We know that no matter
how true those statements seemed back in their day, they are not true answers now. But
what about then? Can we truly judge? The question is, how much time do we need to
determine truth? Years, decades, centuries?
Suppose I asked the Oscillator if the Earth was flat, and it answered yes. What
would you say to that?
Are you asking me if the Oscillator is fallible? Or are you asking me if it is
flawed. It is not flawed. It is what it is. Statistically it cannot help but give us a correct
answer. Could that answer be fallible? We are still waiting to see. We dont believe it is
without fault. You see, we dont believe any information processing systems can be
without fault. Otherwise, it would not be able to grow, to mature, to develop. Faults and

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errors need to occur, on which the Oscillator can then find ways to overcome and correct
those errors. Again, we feel we have accomplished that.
Come this way, he said.
* * *

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The world had gone bonkers over chance. There was not any aspect of ones life
that was not described somewhere somehow to chance in some book of statistics.
Statistics describe the very things we cannot see: the average, the mean, the probable, the
improbable. Yet mankind had decided that statistics were in fact the very blood and cloth
of man. In the past one hundred years chance had gone from witchery to mans highest
science.
And so statistics were the lifeblood and soul of K, nothing unusual among the
major cities throughout the continent. In K, numbers were divided only between people
and stuff. Vital statistics births, marriages, divorces, deaths were handled in the
Register Generals office. Stuff was managed by the Bureau of Trade, a department with a
long and checkered past. An unwieldy and perpetually dubious bureaucracy, it was
nonetheless an institution visited by various dignitaries including Locke, Burke and Mill.
It had been at various times called the commercial, labor and finally the statistical
department, which meant nothing more than an office that dealt with whatever was left
after the other departments. One perceived of these offices as being organized around a
centralized number gathering facility, but nothing could have been farther from the truth.
Piles and rooms and catacombs of information continued grossly redundant across the
various disciplines, retrieval and re-appropriation of files always led to new surprises.
Every year new departments sprang up veterinary, waste management, tidal

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commission, vermin and pestilence, each collected its own statistics under their own
methods. Only when numbers finally became appreciated for just what they were and
nothing else were attempts made to bring all this information into one centralized
bureaucratic organization. The effect would shape the very structure and operation of all
aspects of K from the width of its walkways to the number of prison rooms and
attendants.
These institutions brought a new kind of man into being, the man whose essence
was plotted by thousands of numbers. To do this the office accompanies man from his
birth, and takes account of his first cry, his baptism, his vaccinations, his schooling, his
success, his diligence, his leave of school. His subsequent education and development,
and once he becomes a man his physique and his ability to bear arms. It also
accompanies him on subsequent steps as he walks through life, it takes note of his chosen
occupation, where he sets up household, and his management of his finances, if he saved
from the abundance of his youth for his old age, if an when and who he marries, and at
what age, Should he suffer a shipwreck later in life, undergo material or spiritual ruin, it
will take note of that. We leave a man only after his death, that is only after we have
ascertained the precise nature and cause of death and duly noted the causes that brought
about his death.
Here it was clear that a collection of men is made up of a certain number of
persons of all kinds, and this collection if large enough brings about astonishing
regularity. For example, the number of divorces is very much the same from one decade
to the next. the number of births, stillborns, and deaths will be the same from year to year.
In other words, these events which may seem to depend on a multitude of diverse events

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and effects, have a periodic recurrence, a fixed proportion, seem to follow a law if you
will. We were silos of information on everything imaginable. Granaries of science. The
more columns across the head of a table the better. The more pages of data, the more
entries that could be referenced and cross referenced, the more power we seemed to be
stock piling within these silos of information. And from this information came new laws.
Within the bureau of statistics, man became a mere husk of reality.
Yet, I have often wondered, was it indeed chance that brought this woman to me
on that undignified morning? Just what is this thing we call chance? Is it merely that
which we are ignorant of? That which we cannot calculate? We divide the world into
those aspects that seem to follow the concise natural laws given them and those other
aspects that do not so behave. Some would say those things we understand in the way of
probabilities are only awaiting future instrumentation to remove the cloud of unknowing
for us. But is chance really a measure of our frailty, our ignorance, our inability to know
what is merely fortuitous? The idea that we cannot know something with certainty only
because we cannot possibly horde all the data that would be necessary to know, points to
a flaw in our faculties not to a flaw in the way of the world. Just because I cannot see
certain wavelengths of light, certainly does not mean they dont exist. A different mind,
for instance a butterflys, may be able to see what I cannot see. I can imagine a machine
that can produce a response to this wavelength of light that I cannot see or a frequency of
sound I cannot hear. And so a different mind or a machine may be able to compute all the
variables necessary to turn the fortuitous into the certain. Why not?
It was Nietzsche who had said:

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These iron hands of necessity that shake the dice box of chance play this game for
an infinite length of time: so that there have to be throws which exactly resemble
purposiveness and rationality of every degree.
Chance and necessity are inextricable.
Were we a chance encounter like that of two atoms in a room, brought together by
a nearly indeterminable set of events? An event we would more romantically ascribe to
fate? Chances that are nil are obviously no chances at all. And the same can be said of
chances that are absolutely determined. Chance requires some potential for error but
some room for success as well, some amount of unpredictability but perhaps an equal
amount of the expected, some element of chaos but a respectable amount of order. So
began my analysis. She, if like most people, probably walked this same route every day,
walked it at the same time, and for the same purpose: to get to work. And so her path was
regular, not random and could indeed be determined to a refined extent. I, on the other
hand, well although you might be correct in saying that I could often be found supine in
the street any given morning, it was not exactly predictable what street or gutter I would
grace with bum or cheek. Still, despite the randomizing factors of alcohol or strength of
constitution, my path could be circumscribed and defined in a way to limit the
possibilities and thereby increase the chance of falling in her path on this particular
morning. So you might say chances were not great that she would find me, but chances
were not impossible. So fate is diminished and the role of chance elevated. The
probability of our meeting would be strengthened (and chance diminished) if she was a
person who sought to help others who have fallen drunk into the gutter, which seems to
be the case. Had she nothing but spite and loathing for such people as me then the

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chance would have nearly vanished. And then I suppose I had to be willing to be picked
up form the sewer, there had to be some part of me wanting to be saved from the slop,
otherwise, chances would have once again been greatly diminished. That she was not
worried about being late for work and so could take the time to wash me off and clothe
me in her husbands clean clothes, also added an element of success to this scenario. Had
her husband been a man who drank and fell in sewers, my chances might have been
severely diminished. Had a policeman found me first and dragged me off to the gaol,
well the chances of that happening would have to be subtracted from the chances we are
talking about here. In fact, the chance of being pulled up by a bobby was nearly one
hundred as that is not only their job but they seem to take a certain pleasure in making an
example of us sots in front of the morning traffic and there are certainly always enough of
them perusing the streets in the morning. Add to this the first thing you think when you
see a man face down in the sewer which is that the bloke is dead, and that thought further
diminished the chances of some woman in a clean dress coming over to help you up. So
the more I thought about it, when I added and subtracted all the various probabilities that
could have some into play on this very morning in questions, I was left believing that
chance was not a statistical process, but a thing in and of itself, a characteristic so to
speak of the object whose orbit one is trying to predict. And so the more I through about
this, the more it seemed to me, that she, this woman, was not adorned this morning with
anything you might call chance. There was actually no chance at all that she could have
found me and helped me, which meant she had to find me. Does that mean it was fate?
Only if the chance was zero, which it was not. Which meant the only way she could have
found me was if she set out that morning with a plan to find me, that in fact she knew

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where I was and had every intention of coming to my assistance. Perhaps that explains
why her husbands suit was hanging out before she brought me to her flat. But to be fair,
the idea seemed ludicrous at the time.
Maybe the fact is some things, perhaps all things, all events are simply
determined, not susceptible to fate as much as simply fated. Wasnt it Galileo who taught
us many years ago that God wrote the world in the language of mathematics? The world
now indeed seems to be engaged in a race to discover the final laws of nature, to expand
our understandings from the deepest of space to the most inner workings of the human
mind. Whether by simple laws or statistical laws, there are laws for everything,
irreducible and ultimate. Our books and newspapers were filled with the excitement that
science was creating on the winds of its newfound confidence and power. Implicit in all
this was the idea that we will have now and forever a complete and determined map of
the universe. This we will have in spirit, of course, rather than in substance, as no one yet
seems capable of producing the volumes of books that will be required to document this
map of the big and little.
Yet while we may rest assured that all is orderly and determined in our world at
the level of natural law, our own Industrial Revolution has made a mockery of certainty.
While we gained a certain professional lust for precision, whether the gaps between
blades in a machine or the mount of current required to plate one metal to another or the
movement of a clock that determines the workers shifts, we were driven by our very
economics and methods of production to view people as groups and classes not as
individuals, to look for trends not exact measurements, to devise and make decisions
based on patterns rather than individual facts, and to calculate risks and rewards based on

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guess what? Thats right on chance. Could we say that Galileo was right, only he had no
idea that Gods math was so complex? So full of uncertainty?
Furthermore we simply do not behave as if the world is determined, that is not
how we negotiate the world, either as scientists, industrialists or mere pedestrians. In
fact, nearly every aspect of our life is based on calculations that we make about the
world, about other people, about the things we have and want. We get up in the morning
and calculate how many minutes it will take us to get ready for work. This time is only
approximate though as we may be delayed at the public bath, we may discover a moth ate
a hole in our wool jacket. We look at the sky and come up with a probability of will it
rain or snow? Do we take an umbrella and give our selves some extra time to make our
way through a storm? So many things can happen to change our calculation of getting
ready for work.
The same goes for our dealings with people. We see someone on the street
walking towards us. We determine very quickly if that person is a threat, for example, is
he drunk and weaving back and forth or carrying a weapon of some sort, or is he
someone we can pass with no trepidation whatsoever. We dont know for sure, but we
form an approximation of this man and his potential capabilities by looking at his
behavior, his dress, his walk, his countenance, and we make a decision: do we walk past
him or do we go another way? What is striking about this case is that we may decide the
approaching man is not to be feared and walk past him when suddenly he strikes out at
us. We may be surprised at this mans reaction, but not totally. In other words, we are
always prepared to be wrong in many if not indeed all of our judgments.

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This is a pattern we see in every moment of our lives. We calculate how much we
have to spend versus how much we want something and sometimes buy an object that
puts us uncomfortably into debt. We think we are listening to a certain song and may
even sing along with it for a few lines, then discover it was a different tune altogether. We
are in a conversation with someone on the train and with all the noise of the engines and
the other people we can only hear parts of his speech, yet we are able to guess what he is
saying. Still, there may be a time or two when we discover we did not hear correctly.
Again, this does not surprise us.
In other words, our daily trip through life is made up of experiences that are not
based on natural law, our decisions so often rely on gross approximations, on our own
personal grasp of the possibilities. We guess our way through life! And when we are
wrong, we rarely despair, we never curse the universe! We may laugh, we may even get
mad. But our expectations are never more than approximate. Very rarely are we able to
put into practice the exact laws of nature and use that as an explanation or as a predictive
tool. We do not put Newtons laws to work to determine how to throw a rock in order to
hit our target, we use our intuition and add to that what we have learned about throwing
into the wind, tossing a certain weight over an object such as a tree, or trying to hit a
moving target. We think in terms of cause and effect, but we rarely are surprised if a
cause does not lead to an expected effect. Our answer when it does not is often: Well this
usually happens when that happens. Not this time I guess.
In other words, natural laws rarely are useful, except, it seems, to allow our
conscience to rest easy that all is determined and knowable. In effect, our world every
minute of every day arises before us out of a primordial chaos of sorts. It does not come

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from order, it attains order only after the fact. That order comes ultimately from our
guesswork about causes and events. We believe in order but we never truly understand
all or even any of the causes that create one situation and then another. We know a wind
blew a branch against the window, but from whence that wind? We see a man smile at us
as he sells us bread, but what made him happy today and not sad? Was he smiling
because of me, because I put a penny in his hand, or because he was having a thought
about a day he once spent at the beach? What if the weather today had been cold, the
bread stale, his wife mean this morning, his child sick? What would his facial reaction
have been? The world is but chaos, covered over by the miracle of order that we lay upon
its every second and scene.
The scientist is no different than the rest of us, even if he believes he sees the
world through natural laws. To get most of his answers, he uses approximation all the
time. He blames the fact that his instruments are none too exact, or that the details he is
skipping are too minute to matter. But in many cases the scientist is seeking
approximations, probabilities and not exact descriptions whatsoever. Exact descriptions
do not exist in our world! How many inches of rain does the city receive on average each
year. Here he seeks an average value, say 29 inches. Yet there may never be a year that
receives exactly 29 inches. A doctor looking at a patients symptoms may only have
enough information to say, There is a high probability that you have this disease. And
that may be the best he can do. And so on.
The things we observe are for the most part unforeseen and impossible to foresee,
yet we are not bewildered by the unknown, we do not walk through life without
expectations. That is because we are probabilistic beings. We manage our lives through

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calculated risk. We are undeterred by change. We accept a certain capriciousness in daily

events. When we can we seek to benefit from chance events, we do this at the race
grounds as well as if a truck full of money would spill across the street. We live by a
faculty built on contingencies, we allow a certain tolerance in events coming to action,
we have an unknown and unquantifiable calculus that allows error to events and or things
to happen unexpectedly. We can take what has happened and apply our scientific
reasoning backwards in time. That is how we get the cause. To do so forewords, can be
done, but when we are right in our attempts we are as often to claim luck as skill. And
when we are right, we are just as ready to admit that we may have been wrong, such is
our own understanding of our limitations. We know that we sample but a sliver of the
universe, and that we have not the time or capacity to take into account all the factors that
lie before us. On top of that we are a risk taking race, and so at every opportunity tit
seems we will add to our unknowing by adding some superstition, some intuition, a
hunch maybe. Because we know we are no better than any of these.
The world was but chance, open your eyes and chance floods in from every
corner, ever side. And we are all but players in this grand enterprise. The bad player is the
one who tries to calculate his odds and play as if life were but a game. He takes multiple
chances at differing odds, hoping to capitalize by baiting those numbers set out before
him. To do so however is to succumb to another of the natural laws, the law of large
numbers: given enough instances our choice will always be decided by the average result.
The good player does not fool himself and accepts that there is but one chance, which
produces by chance the necessity and even the purpose that he desires. Necessity and

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chance are inseparably twinned, neither exists without the other, neither explains the
other. No more than heads explains tails.
An event may be very probably but does that explain it occurrence the first time,
the next time? Is explanation is provided by data that increases the probability of an even,
decreases its probability of happening? The fact is, probability and statistics do nothing to
explain or help us understand the single event that confronts at a given time.
And so what game had I chosen for myself, what chance was I playing on this
morning years ago when I fell and lay destitute in the debris and sewage of the street,
while a hundred, perhaps a thousand persons passed over and across me, not unlike atoms
of gas careening about in the atmosphere? Was it truly only a matter of time until one
random person collides with me, and by chance it was her, fortuitously this one particular
woman out of all the incalculable possibilities? What ever the game, whatever the
chance, she was the one who, while on her way to work, had somehow recognized in that
calamity of sludge, offal and sewage a man who sat four desks away from her at the
Budget Office of the Military and stopped.
What in hells blazes are you doing there? she asked.
Sleeping I suppose, I said as I stood up, letting the water drain from my pants and
a few worms fall from my shirt sleeves. Until I was rudely awakened that is.
You cant go to work like this, she said.
I wasnt planning to, I said, go to work that is.
You have to go to work, she said. Come on, we have time to clean you up.
Luckily for me, and perhaps more luckily for her, it began to rain. A torrential
downpour seemed to have caught everyone by surprise, but did a pretty good job of

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cleaning the sludge and filth off me before we got to her place. She guided me to her
third story flat in a decent dwelling a few blocks from the derelict model dwellings where
I lived, hers a small one room studio but with a luxury I had not seen before: a private
cast iron tub.
You will have to use my bath water, she said, we dont have time to pull a new
bath for you. Let me start a fresh kettle to heat it up a bit. She lit the stove then managed
to get me undressed, and I slipped into the still warm, milky white waters that smelled of
lavender, waters even though they had bathed her were far too clean for the neglected
recesses of my body. I watched an oily grime float to the service. Dark hairs and bits of
filth. I was suddenly ashamed. Within a few minutes the kettle was steaming and she
poured that in the tub, the boiling water snapping at my legs and groin. She had taken off
her dress, and in her petticoat she bent down and washed me with a sponge. Her hands
were the most beautiful I had ever seen, long fingers, graceful and perfect to the nail. Her
arms were soft but strong. Her bosoms moved slightly beneath her chemise as she
scrubbed my shoulders and legs.
You will have to do the rest yourself, she said, standing up and making us both a
cup of tea. She returned and shaved me with the skill of a barber. She then had me stand
up and rinsed me with cold water, telling me she was sorry, an apology either for the icy
rinse or for having to stare into my private areas. I was now wide awake. Like a hurried
mother with a child, she then dried me with a rag, and I accepted it all silently, with a bit
of awe. About this time I noticed the mans suit and dress shirt which had been hanging
from a peg, I had to assume it was there before we walked in, I would have seen her pull
them out of a closet. I had to ask.

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They belonged to my husband, she answered.

I assume he wont mind? I asked.
No, she said, the only suit he cares about is the one he is buried in. You? You only
look dead. It appears he was quite a bit larger than you. In chest and leg anyway.
I turned around to witness her put on a dry dress over her white chemise. Her old
dress was in a pool at her feet, stained with the mud and stench I now recognized as a
constant effluvium of my life. She did not seem to be the bit embarrassed by any of this
hurried intimacy. I had to say something about her being the first woman to see me
naked without being paid.
Then you owe me, she said, but come on, we are both late now.

Later, years later, I would surmise that chance is what we accept when we want to
see things our way. When we were ready to accept the truth, then chance has no being.
* * *

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And so I was about to say, during the four years prior to 1908, 80% of the
indigenous population of what is now Nambia was killed by the German colonials. The
men of Nambia did not flee, they fought back but to no avail. Surviving women were
forced to be prostitutes to German soldiers.

During Leopolds reign of terror which ended in 1908 more than eight million
natives of the Free Congo were believed to have died from murder, disease or starvation.
Millions of black hands are hiding in forgotten reliquaries throughout Europe.

Picasso painted The Dryad in 1908 and it is called ugly still to this day.

* * *

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You have asked many questions about reliability, fallibility, lying and cheating,
Dr. Z said, questions I have had to answer from many others who claimed that when we
have the chance finally to build our calculation power on a mechanical and thereby
reliable platform why do you resort to the most unreliable of all decision makers men?
People taken singularly are most unreliable when it comes to calculations. Each person
on his or her own is capable of making a wrong answer, perhaps for very different
reasons: ignorance, fatigue, lack of concentration. Other reasons such as spite, mental
illness, rebelliousness, or just plain apathy. Some people may simply be delusional,
drunk, they may have lost a son or a daughter and are so distressed they cant think. The
reasons are endless and coming up with more reasons does not diminish the average
effectiveness of one computor if indeed you are actually talking about the average of
thousands.
Originally, I had thought that each computor would be responsible for a certain
autonomous bit of information, a calculation that I would have to assume was true and
done to the best of that persons ability. I was well aware of the risk I was taking. With
all the straying elements as I set forth a minute ago, how could I trust any one person in
this way? I wasnt worried though, the fact is we trust people in this way all through the
day and all through out life. Each and every person is of course a possible source of
irrational perhaps errant behavior, but what are the chance of that happening. Better yet
how often do you actually see that happen? Almost never right? People generally

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behave. I had thought of using a police force to and other forms of control like many
corporations do, but I said to myself, the world for the most part gets along just fine
without police, without enforced rules.
What you see here below you in microcosm is what we would see if we could
gather all the data of the universe. This, the law of error is a form of cosmic order, one
that if the Greeks could understand it would worship it as a god. It reigns in severity
amidst the wildest confusion. The larger the mob and the greater the anarchy, the more
perfect is its sway. Let a large sample of chaotic elements be taken and bring them
together and then you will see however wildly irregular they appear, an unexpected and
most beautiful form of regulatory proves to be present there all along.
Our ability for inquiry of an abstract sort is a product of evolution, but it is at best
of indifferent value for our survival. We should think instead of mental abilities as
evolving parallel to the evolution of the laws of the universe. We can discover the latter
because they and out minds evolved in the same way.
During this, only my first week, I had nearly forgotten that I was here for a tutors
position. My demeanor had changed. I had given into my body which had found a new
peace. My mind suddenly seemed desirous to follow. My common sense was the only
hold out. And the only way I could combat this mind-body betrayal was to remain the
skeptic, and ask questions.
What kinds of things are you computing?
Originally, I wanted to be able to do something no one had been able to do before,
which was accurately predicting the weather up to six days in advance. We know all the
factors that go into making up weather, convection, circulation, humidity, pressure

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changes, altitude, temperature all are very well studied and have regular laws that
pertain to a complete understanding of their aspects. But put these things together and
allow time to wreck havoc on the order and procession and magnitude of these elements
and all chaos seems to break out. Again, I knew it was a computable problem, it was a
matter of time and resources.
How is this being funded?
Several different governments give us money in return to ask for answers they
needed to certain questions. Great Britain wants predictions on cod populations. The
United States usually asks for stock market information. Several countries are looking
for help in population trends, food supplies, that sort of stuff. We do not provide answers
to military questions or anything that would compromise the safety or well being of
another country state. This is a humanistic enterprise, created for the good of all.
What are some of the major discoveries the Oscillator has made?
Well, the main use of the Oscillator is to provide answers to questions submitted
by the sponsors, and their questions generally are fairly short sighted and self serving.
Increasingly, it seems that many sponsors are selling their questions to the private sector.
But it really does not matter to us. We have for example, been able to come up with a
better strain of corn for the Americans which resists mold. For a Chinese group, we have
secretly calculated the engineering specifications for a dam they propose to build across
the Yangtze River. Sir William Cookes has been asking questions related to the
manufacture of synthetic diamonds, which for some reason also interests my friend
Herbert. The Academie francaise has asked us what the effect would be of not allowing
any additional words into their vocabulary. An interesting question, when you think

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about it. Would their language ossify? Would it no longer be accepted in other countries
and thereby no longer be a form of semantic currency, as any currency requires some
form of exchange? How about translation? Nehanda, queen of Zimbabwe, wanted to
know how large could a bull be grown before it surpassed the supporting strength of its
skeletal structure. Some say the queen was really asking this question about her husband,
but I believe that is only a cruel rumor. It has been interesting. From our most advanced
sponsors we get the most practical questions. From developing nations, we get questions
about the meaning of life, the ideas of good and evil. We process thousands of new
requests a day, but come, I need to show you some things that you cannot see from here.
We then hurried down the spiral staircase at a dizzying clip, eight or nine stories,
the elderly scientist gaining on me with every turn. We reached the ground floor and he
took me through some large double doors to a room filled with circular turntables stacked
eight to ten shelves high with books. Attendants were taking books off the shelves,
bringing them to a front desk, completing paperwork and handing them to a person who
rushed with the book to a reading area, where they stood at counters and read, scribbling
notes into small black notebooks. Some who were finished reading, rushed the book
back to the counter, where the attendant quickly took the book back and replaced it on the
shelves.
Since before the advent of the printed word, Dr. Z said, knowledge has been on a
rising exodus to places beyond the confines of our brains. Perhaps most of human
knowledge now resides in things like books, letters, papers and songs. So underneath the
outermost balconies, we have amassed a library here the size and likes of which will rival
the library of any university anywhere in the world. These request counters that you see

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here continue in a huge circle all the way around the building. Computors who need
special bits of information come here. A question such as yours has probably never been
asked before, but many questions have been asked and answered and we can use these
resources to operate more efficiently within the overall system. Requests to the library
take place on average two hundred times a minute, and so we have more than 2,000
librarians working at all times. Parallel to these activities related to past knowledge, we
have created a library of new ideas, the ideas and answers that the Oscillator creates
every second of every day, these are recorded, classified and kept on file for immediate
use and future reference. In the last seven years, the number of pages in our new library
has grown to exceed the number of pages in all the libraries in the world. Each week we
add a million volumes of new literature to the world.
We had taken a stairway that led to a lower floor. We stood on a balcony just
halfway between the floors and looked out over a bustling crowd. Just below us was a
vast waiting room of sorts that led to a network of tunnels filled with the crowded bustle
of a major train station during the holidays. Dr. Z explained that this was where the
computors met their trains, parked their bikes, came to and from home. If you worked
here, you could not enter the Oscillator from the outside street as I did, only through these
underground entrances. Thousands of people were hustling back and forth, passing
through turnstiles, their badges being checked by security on the way in and the way out.
Just like the brain, you can see the Oscillator is not isolated from the outside
world, Dr. Z said, the Oscillator is an open system, it has to be. If it were a closed system
how would it function, how would it grow?

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In fact there are two ways in which the outside world communicates directly with
the Oscillator. First it has direct conduits to the real world out there. People come and go
at all times, day and all night, seven days a week, fifty two weeks a year, what they bring
with them can be good or it can be bad, we cant select in advance what that will be. The
system seems to know, seems to have developed ways to protect itself, bad elements such
as a person who is not able to function within the Oscillator will be surrounded and
brought back outside, and someone else will immediately take that persons place.
Knowledge or beliefs are not criteria for removal, behavior is. If someone begins to act
crazy, threatening to harm someone else, then they have to leave. Whether they are
Anglican or Jewish, European or African, does not matter.
Originally, as a measure to protect this egalitarianism, we thought we would have
to deploy a control force, policemen in other words, it seemed natural. All aspects of
human society seem to require such measures. These special units were to be dispatched
to calm any outburst or to take care of an altercation or troublesome elements. Turns out,
we have never had a need for such controls. But to honest, I often wonder about the
future. The Oscillator is only seven years old now, it is still a child. It is in love with
everything it sees, everything it touches. What happens as it matures? What happens
when it reaches adolescence? What changes can we expect to take place? All interesting
questions.
His conjecture that the Oscillator was but a child was a haunting admission to
hear. I suddenly wondered how the system protected itself against scientists with
loosening screws. We continued down the stairways and through some heavy metal

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doors. Inside was the old, familiar hum of machines, huge capacitors. Massive banks of
batteries were bolted to the floor, the smell of electricity permeated the air.
This is where we collect and store some of the energy from the Oscillator and
return it back for use inside the building. You remember the wire girds above the floor
and how we used these wires to trace the currents in the Oscillator. Well, a side effect of
all this was revealed when I shut off the central power one day and discovered the wires
were still carrying a significant electrical charge. And so I came up with the obvious idea
of putting that excess energy to work and so that is how all the lights and emergency
powers systems are now powered. We are completely self sufficient. No one, no
accident can shut us down.
We climbed back up a few floors and Dr. Z then took me to another room that
looked much like a bank vault, down to the metal drawers that could be pushed through
openings in the heavy walls delivering pieces of paper to unseen recipients on the other
side. Clearly I still had not been converted. And so the picture was beginning to emerge
in my mind that measures were being implemented to draw up the bridges, bolt the doors
and seal off the outside completely. Was this to protect itself from the outside? Or just to
be alone? We continued our tour.
This is where the questions are fed into the Oscillator, he said. This is the other
area where the Oscillator meets the outside world. These questions and other kinds of
information are delivered along defined routes where they then can be processed by the
Oscillator as a whole in the manner that I showed you before. Dont worry, we will
return and after having seen all this you will have a new perspective on how the
Oscillator works. But first I want to take you down to the floor.

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* * *

131

She had seen me naked. I had seen her in a less compromising and more
respectable stage of undress. She had shaved my face. I buttoned the back of her dress.
She wiped a lingering bit of the night from out of my eye. I laced her shoes. What else
was left after this first morning together than to get married? Well, we decided to live
together anyway. This was more a decision forced when she witnessed the absolute hovel
in which I had been living. We found a two room flat in her building and everything was
great.
It was true. I found myself again so to speak. She was a beautiful woman with
features as independent as they were striking, her hair an abundance of gorgeous red
waves that fell past the middle of her back when she let it down. She had an agenda of
her own. She chose to be with me, I suppose, not so much because I supported her, but
because I did not interfere.
Well, I never interfered with her life, but the fact was I rarely saw her. We both
worked 10 hours a day at the Budget Office, then I went home while she went off to any
one of a myriad of meetings or activities: musical, political, educational. I tried to keep
up but couldnt. I would spend a few hours at the public house, gaining acquaintances,
but drinking little, then would go home and be asleep by the time she returned. I never
complained, never smelled the odor of a mans cigar in her hair, and so accepted what
was. I thought I knew about people, about women. Now living with one, I realized I

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knew nothing at all, that for so many years I had been gathering useless information and
so had to begin all over again.
This relationship had happened so naturally, so randomly that it did not occur to
me for some time to even ask if we were in love or not. We were kind and considerate to
each other. We took care of one other in the same basic ways we did the first day we met.
We fed each other, clothed each other. I brushed her hair, she made me tea. It was as odd
as it was comforting. With nothing to compare it to, I assumed this was as good as it
could be.
Until one night. We had bought a piano a few months ago with some money we
had saved for this purpose. Now she no longer had to walk to the church to play. Yet
since its arrival, she had not touched a key. I didnt ask. Simply let it be.
On night I awoke in the wee hours of the morning to her playing softly in the
other room, a simple tune, happy in melody but sad in her expression. I listened first to
the single notes, even though it was a song I had Heard many times before I did not at
first hear the song, simple the notes as if they were drips of water or bird feet stepping
across a musical surface, I could follow them, perhaps I was still asleep, up and down
and across the page just like the notes they were on paper, but I took from each note I
heard and knew immediately the next note and the next, and then at some point, not
gradually but all at once they ceased being notes and turned into the song I knew so well,
the notes were gone now and I was carried on a plane of music, from two to three
dimensions I now floated either in my sleep or in a bliss not far from sleeping, the
immediate and the definite of the single notes were transformed into a vaster, more
abstract blanket of song and one this I now floated, drifted, when a soft voice suddenly

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appeared, soft and faint below the thick blanket of music but audible all the same, a
familiar voice, a voice that I had long loved, long cherished, perhaps always loved an
always cherished for how could I listen to this voice without thinking completely and
unequivocally of this love I had this cherish I felt, it was the voice of my beloved, singing
below, through and above this song faintly at first and never to grow too loud but
weaving its way in and around as if asking me to search through various rooms, turning
my head this way and that in search of the source of that voice, that voice I knew so well,
but knew not from where it sang, this voice which began to vanish, died down to lass
than a whisper, as if I had turned the wrong way, then would rise up again in tone and
clarity as if indeed I was back in the right direction, until this three dimension plane of
music and the fourth dimension of this voice transformed into a true fourth dimension
and suddenly I found myself in a story, in the midst of a tale that I knew from beginning
to end, could hear and see and understand from one end to another regardless of where
the voice was presently singing, an abstraction that brought only more beauty to this
piece as it carried with it all such layers of comfort and familiarity, I was surrounded in
its abundance and that abundance was not only mine for the movement but was every
where and forever, it reached out and touched all parts and times and aspects of my life,
all knowing, all present, and so perhaps it was sleep that lad me to these states of mind
but I suddenly noticed that all this bliss and connection was drifting away, beginning to
break apart, the song remained but the voice faded, disappeared midsentence or sang in a
way in a direction that would not allow me to follow its lead, until it occurred to me that
the reason this voice grew strong and then faded was not because I was clumsy in my
search, not because I was impatient in choosing my direction, the voice was I could not

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go back to sleep and so I put on a robe and waked into the room. By candle light she was
playing, her eyes closed but wet and swollen with tears. From her trembling lips, she
barely whispered out the tune.
In the sweet bye and bye
We shall meet on that beautiful shore
In the sweet
I walked up behind her and touched her arm. She immediately stopped playing
but would not open her eyes. In her chest was a shudder she ws struggling to hold back,
something she was afraid for me to see. I touched her hair, her cheek and when she still
did not open her eyes, I turned and walked back into the bedroom and waited for her to
return.
There was so much I didnt know, but I do know the song of love unrequited. I
know the pain that accompanies the simplest songs that mark a time a life, an instant, a
promise, the songs with words that have no meanings yet all the same carry all the
meanings and memories of the world. Much later, when she came back to bed, I waited
until she had settled beneath the covers. Then I put my head up to her ear and my arm
across her chest. She took my hand.
Do you love me? I whispered.
Of course, she said. Why do you ask?
Because I never asked you that before. .
Before you may have needed to ask. From now on, you never will.
She never played the piano again and I never asked again. Not that particular
question anyway.

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Have you thought about getting married? I asked her one day as we sat on a bench
at a park.
Sure.
And what were your thoughts?
How dreadfully stupid that would be.
Even to me?
Even to anyone.
Really.
Sure. What do I have to gain? Would you love me more?
No. Of course not, but
So you see.
What about children?
What about them? she asked. They seem to be everywhere. Like weeds.
Have you ever thought about having a child?
She stood up, put her arms around me and placed her lips against my forehead.
I already have one, she said with a muffled tone.
While we both began working at fairly comparable positions at the Budget Office,
to my surprise I was quickly promoted several times after meeting my wife. I felt a little
guilty suddenly having a larger, better calculating machine than her. I could sense a bit of
jealousy from her when I was given my own cubicle. When I was told I could have an
assistant, I made sure it was a male. But we both benefited as my salary grew and we
were living quite comfortably.
* * *

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As I was saying, Les Demoiselles dAvignon portrays five women who seem to be
caught within broken mirrors, or perhaps patched together from torsos and utterly stray
heads, wrapped and shrouded in bloodied white sheets, their faces have lost their sense of
self, eyes blinded by what they no longer know.

Between 1887 and 1889, he is believed to have killed as many as eleven

prostitutes, although authorities agree that only five belong to the same killer. His
signature: deep jagged wounds, throats slashed, abdomens emptied. The last two were so
disfigured they could be identified only by their eyes. One missing her heart. For many,
these murders were emblematic of the female vice that polluted the streets.

Two of the five women in Demoiselles wear masks, one with an empty shadow on
her chest, wings of dried blood surround her. In front of them all, on a table sits what
could be fruit, yet from another perspective could be a knife next to a uterus, heart, and
ovaries. The background is dark cavern opening onto a fractured circle of light, like a
sewage tunnel emptying into the swallowing sea:

Mary Ann Nichols

Anna Chapman
Elizabeth Stride

Catherine Eddowes
May Jane Kelly

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* * *

138

One day, my wife and I were both called into the Directors office where we were
abruptly notified that since we were living together outside of wedlock, we were in
violation of our employment agreements. The choice was to either get married
immediately or she, the female half of the issue, would have to leave work. Had I known
before this little stipulation, I might have used it to my favor.
However, instead of agreeing that the two of us would exchange vows before the
church, she immediately stated that she quit. Quick tempered as she often could be, and
seizing an opportunity to make a political gesture to the public, she walked out in a storm
of expletives rather than receive her severance pay. No less than twelve other women
walked out with her, one of them lifting her dress to show her stockings and knickers to
us remaining men before she slammed the door. My male coworkers all looked at me
with an admixture of sorrow and jealousy. Perhaps I should have walked out too, in a
show of camaraderie. As I sat back down at my calculating machine, immobilized, I
realized how much stronger she was than me. The thought suddenly struck me then and
there that if I did not run out and join her, she might leave me altogether. She was
striding down a future path that had no place for me unless I fought to be there. I didnt
move from my chair.
Unknown to her, however, I had been planning my departure for other reasons.
With my promotions, I was presented with projects that were increasingly disagreeable.
Originally I was asked to look at the statistical causes of war. When I inquired as to what

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those might be, I was told to identify them and then present a study. The only aspect of
this work that I enjoyed was the library that I had access to at anytime and the clerks who
always seemed pleased to help. With no place to start, I decided I could start anywhere
and so began by simply cataloguing all the various wars that had taken place during the
last four hundred years. This was not as easy as it may sound, as questions concerning
what is a war exactly, when does a war begin and when does a war end, all had to be
defined. No simple task. But once the process began, something started to grow out of
the mounds of data that emerged.
I realized from the beginning of this process that I had to make a lot of
assumptions and that many of these were based on my own personal philosophies and
opinions. For the most part I would say that while the final result was a statistical study
of deadly conflict (as I eventually defined war), the actual results were largely ruled by
luck and intuition. What I did find out was rather interesting, for example the conditions
required for a new war to start in any given year were very numerous and existed in
almost any year, while the occurrence of war from these initial conditions was very small.
I was even able to show that wars distributed themselves according to a Poisson
distribution which put them on the same level as two gas particles striking each other in
the atmosphere. War was in fact a very rare and random event. And I further
demonstrated that wars are not become more frequent, in fact their frequency is
decreasing. You could hardly call us a warlike people.
Secondly, of the wars that occurred, the number of wars that were small in
magnitude, less than one hundred thousand killed, was relatively large. Wars of
increasing magnitudes had proportionally lower occurrences. This progression was not

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random and followed a pattern that one can find when you drop a vase. The number of
small fragments is much larger than the number of large fragments. Interestingly, the
distribution of vase fragments by size was nearly identical to the distribution of wars by
magnitude. Next I found out that the duration of any war can be accounted for on the
assumption that of all wars going on in a certain year, 25% of them will end in that year.
A pattern that held up year after year, decade after decade. And there seems to be cycles
of twenty years and one hundred years in war frequency, two oscillations that overlap
each other over time.
Next I discovered that over the last several hundred years, the duration of wars
was decreasing on average, but increasing in bloodiness. In other words, a typical war
may be shorter, but more people were killed. High death rates shorten the length of wars.
Perhaps most surprisingly, I found that as particular nations industrial prosperity
increases, the number of wars in which that country is engaged increases! Further to my
surprise, the number of deaths due to internal causes such as murders and capital
punishment also increases. In other words, my heroes Saint Simone and Comte could not
have been more wrong! Prosperous industrial societies do not lead to peaceful
existences! Peace through prosperity ironically comes through violence!
I submitted an overview of my report and was told that while all this was of great
interest, the priorities at this time were being refocused. Theories of war needed to take a
back stage to the realities of using the many new technologies of war. I was placed in
charge of munitions procurement, which until my involvement had been budgeted using
variables such as warehouse space, transportation costs, shipping container expenses,
ease of deployment, expiration factors. I saw this as ridiculous. You bought weapons not

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to store and ship them, you bought them to kill people. So costs had to be applied to how
many people each dollar of procurement would kill. Bayonets in todays wars were
worthless, as much as the old generals loved the long blades of steel, battles was being
fought at further and further distances. War used to be fought at a distance of a meter or
less and losses from the use of the bayonet accounted for eighty percent of the armies
engaged. Today we are engaging at distances of one thousand meters or more and the
number killed by bayonet is less than one percent. Rifles, artillery and bombs are the
currency of war now. War strategy was waged according to who could shoot the most
bullets from the greatest distances and dispatch the most enemy forces.
So the question from a budgetary standpoint became: what was the most cost
effective way to kill as many enemy soldiers? This came down to more specific
questions such as: How many bullets did it take to kill a man on average? Which caliber
of bullet was most effective in killing men? What kinds of bullets were the most
effective? Were some bullets able to kill more than one man at a time? How many
grenades did it take to kill a man, or how many men on average did a grenade kill? It
seemed simple, if one grenade killed five men on average and it took one hundred bullets
to kill one man, you simply compared the costs of five hundred bullets to one grenade
and you have your efficiency factor. Yet, an important factor rarely considered was who
was killed? A foot soldier is worth little and easily replaced. An infantryman has been
trained for a much longer period of time and so represents a heavier investment and
higher replacement costs. But the real effect of this new warfare was the ability to kill
the most costly of the soldiers, the officers. Weapons that were sufficiently accurate to
kill a specific target such an officer were extremely valuable. But so were weapons that

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were less accurate and sprayed their destruction less discriminately but over a wider area
thereby killing the expensive officers in their volleys. But you also had to add in the
other factors: the psychological effect of a grenades explosion, the effects on other
soldiers seeing their comrades literally blown apart, the likewise paralyzing effect of
seeing men collapse and die from gun fire when not a sound is heard, no warning given.
Another layer of analysis had to be applied to the supply side of these activities: if
more bullets were being shot, then that meant more ammunition would be needed and
these supplies would have to be transported efficiently to the firing lines. This also meant
that the army had to have sufficient production forces to keep the supplies coming. This
in turn meant that there had to be adequate and undisturbed importation routes and
reasonable pricing of raw materials if the metals and powder had to be imported, which
most required. There had to be plenty of reliable power, and last of all there had to be
adequate labor to produce the increasingly sophisticated munitions. All of these factors
had to be added to the matrices, and then you had to do the same fire bombs, and all other
known devices of human destruction and from there you could begin to create your
analysis.
That was my first pass at the budget. And I was most dissatisfied with the
outcome. It occurred to me that weapons which dont kill but only maimed people may
actually be more effective. Dead or properly maimed, the soldier can no longer fight, so
the essential outcome is the same. But it costs only twenty five times as much to treat an
injured soldier than to bury a dead one. Add to that the annual benefits that must be paid
to the wounded. The best bullets at piercing armor may not be the most cost effective
ammunition in that they swiftly pass through the softer tissues of the soldier and exit

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leaving organs and bones basically unscathed. The best ammunition then was the type
that suffered deformation upon impact, that blew through flesh and tore apart bones and
muscles with as much damage as possible. The best grenades were not those with the
most power, but those that sprayed the most shrapnel, thereby killing and maiming more.
The psychological impact of the messier weapons of war could hardly be minimized, as
what drove men from the battlefield more than sickness and terror! What would be more
horrible to witness: a silent, unmoving field of dead soldiers, or a writhing, screaming
bloody mess of armless, legless, disfigured souls all crying out for mercy! More than
80% of all men who left the battlefield for the infirmary were not injured or hurt from
battle, they were sick, usually mentally and psychologically traumatized. The expense of
taking all these physically and mentally deformed men back into society was staggering.
There were two sides to the cost of war the cost of munitions and the cost of human
misery that follows. Strategy should be to bankrupt economically and morally not
simply wipe out the enemy. War had to be fought to maim not kill.
I then added the variables related to the loss of life of ones own soldiers. If a
weapon killed one enemy but did not protect the soldier from death, was this an effective
weapon? If it killed two men for every soldier killed? But then what if it killed two men
and allowed your soldiers to be wounded? Left them with a loss of hearing? Give them
some kind of nerve disease? Stomach ulcers that needed constant care? I created tables
and matrices stacking these variables against each other and was about to turn in my
monumental treatise on the statistical nature of war when I decided to quit. I told my wife
that I could not turn this in, that it was a tome to killing, that it could be used to plan and
wage a new kind of war, a kind we had never before witnessed.

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I cant be part of something that I will only make worse than it is, I said. She told
me to wait a few days, something might change.
Not believing anything would change unless I was the agent, I was actually
preparing my resignation when I was abruptly brought into my supervisors office.
Apparently, even without turning in my work from the last few months, I had been
recommended to a new position in a different department.
My new position was in the Department of Foreign Trade. My new
responsibilities were to manage the statistics of trade between our country and other
international markets. I was to collect information and create reports on rubber, timber
and mineral shipments, and nothing seemed more enjoyable to me than to be removed
from the study of killing and human mutilation. My work was to document and report on
how the nations of the world were acting cooperatively, in peace; how they were helping
to develop the barbaric nations that lived in poverty and ignorance.
When I got home that evening, she kissed me as if she already knew. Somehow
that kiss spoiled the happiness that I had acquired since leaving my supervisors office. I
had wanted this to be a secret, I wanted to surprise her with the announcement that in my
own small way, I had joined her on her mission. For a moment I felt we were comrades. I
had left the back rooms to the theater of war and had joined in activities that could
actually help mankind do some good in the world. But somehow she knew.
And how wrong I would be.
* * *

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I was now on the floor of the Oscillator itself. There was immediately a strange
sensation of being somewhere I shouldnt be, as if I was violating a place that would
reject me like a contaminant of some kind. I nodded to someone I recognized from my
tenement. His smiling face and ready wave did not mitigate my unease.
Compare what you see now with what you observed up above. It is as if we have
entered the level you would see with a microscope. As I have said, these people here,
with their various hair styles, tie pins and exquisite earrings those are absolutely
beautiful my dear (he said to one of the computors) are the simplest units of the
Oscillator, you cannot divide the system down any further.
But people themselves are made up of organs and those are made up of cells, why
cant you continue looking smaller and smaller?
Professors Schwann and Virchow did formulate some of the main tenants of
organizational biology when they declared that the cell was the fundamental element of
life. And perhaps what makes us different from other animals is precisely what is to be
found in our cells. And in my opinion what makes us sentient beings is undoubtedly
somehow due to these cells in our brain. But those conjectures offer us no improvement
in our understanding the Oscillator. Reductionism will take us on an exercise which for
me is the wrong direction to go. I prefer to go in the other direction, to see the big picture

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first. Without the big picture we will never understand or even be able to ask the right
questions. We can look all we want at cells. But then what?
We walked through the aisles of computors, between the desks and cubicles
everyone toiled diligently, pictures drawn by their children were tacked to the low walls,
a woman had a vase with a single rose in water. For the most part no one paid either Dr.
Z or I any mind. A few looked up and said hello, he shook hands with a man in a blue
jacket but otherwise never stopped talking, except of course when a bullhorn went off
nearby as one did at this moment. Dr. Z smiled at me and playfully wiggled a finger in
his ear. Then he continued.
As you can see looking around you, there are people who have functions other
than computing. There are people whose job is simply to communicate, in some cases to
stop the computing. I call them the inhibidores. Interestingly enough the most important
function on the floor is carried out by those people whose sole job is to stop activity or at
least slow it down. That may seem paradoxical to you. But remember back to those
early days when the oscillator nearly destroyed itself. My theory is that during those
formative times there were not enough of the inhibidores in place, excited computors
would work themselves into frenzies, whole groups spiraling into an orgy of computing,
thereby creating that dangerous state of self destruction. The inhibidores maintain a
balance, but they also seem to coordinate communication and make the processing more
uniform and predictable. They are the artists, they take a substance and make it into
something meaningful. In fact whenever we enter a new bit of information into the
waking Oscillator, we witness a slow down in activity, not a speeding up. This tells me

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that processing comes about through desynchronization, not by simply increasing

activity. An interesting concept dont you agree?
I simply shrugged my shoulders. For the first time I notice a sense of frustration in
Dr. Zs face.
Ok, to give you an idea of how this works, lets consider the basic unit as the
computor right now. What does he or she do? We decided that it was best to give the
computor a few basic and very simple instructions. Here are their only options: One, the
computor can take a question from another computor. Two, the computor can write down
an answer and pass that to another computor. Three, the computor can make a calculation
on his calculating machine. Four, the computor must stop computing if requested by an
inhibidore. Thats it. Most of the time, the computor had no idea what the problem is he
or she is being asked to solve. But they are to answer, to the best they can, the task that is
given to them.
The others in here, they too have specialized roles to play. The maintenance
people keep the place clean, deliver freshly sharpened pencils, provide coffee and water.
Some specialized maintenance people are the ones who go back and forth from the
libraries recovering and delivering certain facts and other pieces of information. The
binders dressed in the blue jackets are the ones who control and facilitate the flow of
information across the floor. There are several different kinds of binders, some work
only with a small group of computors bringing together their answers and then giving
those answers to the binder at another group or cell. Other binders take answers from
groups of cells or columns as we have seen. Still others take answers gathered from
entire systems and finally deliver these to the binders who provide the answers for output.

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Finally there are the bullhorns, the people we originally put in here to stop the
action but now have evolved somewhat on their own to broadcast information across the
space with their horns. Some broadcast it several meters, others broadcast it from one
end to another. That of course is the source of most of the noise that you hear. And it is
the horns that I believe is the cause of some of the oscillations we see, the tertiary ones in
particular. In some sense the horns are the internal clocks of the Oscillator, the rhythms
of their blowing, the oscillations set up by some blowing in unison, others blowing at
various pitches and frequencies, in there somewhere is the true basis, the lifeblood of this
magnificent structure.
At least that is what I believe. Dr. Z said. But as you can see, everyone seems to
take their job very seriously, and like I said earlier, I truly believe they enjoy their roles
tremendously so.
How do you deal with I interrupted, what if someone does not know an answer
or feels like they have to make up an answer?
Ah! You are taking about cheating. Of course. You would be right to imagine that
lying and deceit were big concerns when we first started the Oscillator. How do you deal
with this all too natural human tendency? We figured the most we could do was provide
the checks and balances of others people to control this cheating. But then it occurred to
us, what if it was actually more economical to lie than to come up with a right answer. In
other words, suppose it was easier, which often it is, to say something, anything, rather
than spend the time trying to calculate an answer. If cheating was adopted by everyone,
including the watchdogs who would find it easier to pretend to not see a lie happening
than to go through the trouble of dealing with the liar if this were the case, what would

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the outcome be? Boldly, we decided we would not arbitrate how the system works. This
brings us back to you question about truth if all is to be based on lies and that is the
economical way of the world, then so be it. In actuality, we have found reality to
embrace integrity rather than economy. Interesting huh?
Seems individuals, he continued, have interests which are directly related to
proximity. They first and foremost are interested in themselves, the center of anyones
immediate universe. Then it is the interests of the people around them that matters to
them. From there, their interest in others fades as the distance grows. Ultimately, I think
it is fair to say that few individuals care in any way whatsoever about the wellness of the
Oscillator itself, other than it gives them a job and a place to be. Ask any of these people
what the Oscillator does, and they wont have an answer. Ask them what they do? They
process information. Its that simple.
But within this organization, despite this lack of awareness beyond the most
immediate environment, something unique seems to develop. Individuals do seem to
develop caring for others on a much more global scale that would have been expected.
Perhaps it is because they themselves are subject to inputs and inhibitions from others in
the vast network, sometimes a declination can come from far abroad, perhaps throughout
this process they come to sympathize with others and begin to appreciate the value of
providing honest answers and to behave in a way that has integrity. If they dont, the
consequences will be reversed at some point and they will be the victim.
As you can tell, I am struggling for answers. I have to admit, it seems to me that
there has to be something hardwired in these people, perhaps in all people, to produce the
phenomena and results you see here. You could take any 64,000 people and put them

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into the Oscillator and you would come to the same effect, the same result. I am not sure
where that wiring occurs, as there is nothing in real life that is similar to this. But it is
there, it immediately gives shape and direction, it creates patterns that are survivable, not
transient. It established rules and roles and paths of communication, it immediate creates
oscillations that vibrate locally, spin through nearby sections and ultimately trembles all
across the entire body. Somewhere are the instructions on how to do this. If only we
could find out where those instructions were embedded. Maybe you are right, maybe
eventually we will need to look at those cells. But right now, that would be wasted effort.
And yet still, what if we did discover these instructions, then what? I asked.
My first thought is that with those instructions you could build an Oscillator out
of any set of elements that will operate off those instructions. Surely some day, someone
will succeed in designing a calculation machine out of wires and levers and gears, and it
will take up as little as one tenth the space you see here, and it may be even more
powerful that the Oscillator ever will be. But truthfully, how can such a thing ever
succeed? How can we ever expect to understand the world if we use a machine to try to
understand it? The world is not a machine, the machine is not of the natural world.
Besides, I have already done the calculations, if a machine were to replicate the
Oscillator as you see it here, it would be composed of no less than forty million separate
parts. Suppose each part has an expected lifetime of one year before it needs to be
replaced, a very generous assumption by the way! This would mean that every minute
there would be at least six pieces that would need replacement in that machine. If you
had to turn off the machine to replace a broken part, when would it ever run long enough
to do anything? We would have as many maintenance workers employed to fix the

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constant breaks as we have computors. So what would be the point? Unfortunately,

unlike humans, machines cant be called upon to fix themselves. So you see the problem.
We may like to think the universe runs like a clock, but it could never be a clock.
So my prediction is that we will never be able to build a suitable calculating
machine of any power or worth. Nothing compared to what we have here.
I had completed my first week of work (the actual nature and purpose of this work
I still had to discover), and was convinced. This was something different, something
revolutionary. Dr. Z had somehow looked beyond all the easy methods and models we
had built for our sciences, models created from simplified mathematics, idealized
machines. He had created something that was grander, more complex and hence more
mysterious, but a system that mirrored the very rhythms and mechanisms one could feel
but never understand inside us. I still did not know how to describe what I saw and feel,
the best I can do is to say he had found poetry and was showing not only its origins but
how it manifest itself in the substance of the world.
* * *

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As I wanted to say, in a sketch for Demoiselles, Pablo had drawn the figure of a medical
student amongst the prostitutes, holding a skull. A trace of his presence in the final
painting remains at the table in the center where the organs are collected.

Picassos name for Demoiselles was Le Bordel, The Mess.

I wish I was a woman so that I too could see in patterns, so that I too could
understand humanity from the point of view of the nest, so that I could look at me and see
something, anything.

Due to the anatomically focused, the seemingly surgical nature of the murders, the
suspect behind Jack the Ripper was often thought to be a doctor.

Even Gertrude could not lessen Pablos disdain of women, nor his ecstatic
idealization of them.

* * *

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My new position at the Department of Foreign Trade seemed ideal. I had a large
private cubicle in which to work, a new electric version of the Burroughs calculating
machine. And I was able to keep my assistant, a young sickly man with a dark, gaunt
face, who nonetheless worked hard to please me, rushing to find documents and books I
needed for my research, always sitting next to me like a faithful puppy. Once I got my
bearings on the resources I had at my disposal, which were considerable, I then set about
taking a broad view of the problems that had been posed to me. The government of K
seemed to have a strong interest in the trading patterns of one of our neighboring
countries and as many of the containers and goods had to pass through our ports, we had
ladings reports and detailed inventory lists for many of these shipments. I was asked to
review these transactions and produce a repot summarizing the nature and quantity of
shipments and to detail the monetary and trade value of these imports and exports. There
was an element of espionage in my work, a safe and distant dose of intrigue, one that
added some excitement to working with these tomes of documents.
However, things at home were changing for the worse. My wife suddenly seemed
more distant, her new activities (she never told me exactly what they were organizing
was all she said) took up more and more of her time. She rarely had any interest at all in
what I was doing, never asked about how my new position was going, never seemed to
listen when I told her what I had discovered that day. Although she didnt seem happy, I
assumed she was.

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I had learned by now that this woman had aspirations far beyond living with a
man. She was an artist, but her real passion was in organizing. She talked about meetings
and events and planning attacks and about women who were throwing bombs and
women who were shooting men in the face.
Was such violence really necessary? I had asked
And she looked at me and said, as women it is all we can muster at the moment.
At the office, it was not long before I began to discover some discrepancies in the
Departments records. One of our neighbors was doing a brisk trade with one of its
southern colonies and what little I knew of these far away places, newspaper reports and
popular books described them as vast jungles with little modern infrastructure.
Settlements for the colonists were crude, without much in the way of luxury or
convenience. And so the patterns of exports to these colonies seemed incongruent.
Imports of course were all that was to be expected: rubber, ivory, minerals, hardwoods.
Periodically there would be a shipment of a wild beest sometimes properly identified as
a lion or rhinoceros, sometimes with the label of Unknown Species. Other boxes had
plants specimens, pelts and furs, fossils and pagan artifacts. Then there was the
occasional carton labeled anthropological specimens, itemized to count a certain number
of human hands, human feet, genitalia and hair samples.
However, what was most peculiar were not in the imports from these strange and
uncivilized lands, but in the exports. The amount of hardware and finished goods that
were being shipped to these countries seemed out of proportion. At one point I calculated
the tonnage alone, leaving aside the questions of the identity of the actual articles in the
shipment, and discovered that there was more steel and iron being shipped to a certain

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colony than would be found in most quarters of K. The balance sheets did in fact balance
and the imports were very much equivalent to the exports, but my questions was: what
were they building down there that required so much steel and so much finished goods?
My answer would come fortuitously and logically. I knew that our neighbor who
was exporting these finished goods did not have the means of production internally to
manage these exports without in turn importing them from somewhere else. As I was
beginning to think there was something afoul about all this, I suspected some other
countries, ones that were dedicated to creating problems, always trying to tip balances
and add confusion to the world order they could not otherwise share. I found nothing in
any available reports to show shipments were coming from any of these other rogue
countries. I was dumbfounded until my trusty assistant came in with a book of exports
from none other than K, and there our answer was, right under our nose.
For the past several years, K, where some of the largest manufacturers of firearms
and war armaments were located, had been shipping an increasing supply of weaponry to
our neighbor. Most likely, everyone had assumed these shipments were to support the
growing paranoia of the King of that country who felt surrounded by jealous neighbors
envious of the wealth he had plied from these jungles to the south. But it was quite
evident to see, matching records to records, that these munitions were not remaining
within our neighbors borders, but were being shipped in toto to the settlements in Africa.
There was a war going on in Africa and no one knew this. I hurriedly put together
my report and submitted it to Director.
Very impressive, he said to me after reading my summary. I will see that this is
looked into.

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I can provide you with more documentation, I said, this is only the beginning.
This will be fine, he replied. Let us take some time to look this over. In the
meantime, I have a new project for you
But Sir, I interrupted, these shipments are coming from factories in K, being sent
to Africa, for purposes that one can only begin to imagine As you can see, enough
bullets to kill several million people, bayonets to arm scores of infantry squadrons, what
could be
We understand, of course, he interrupted. But nothing moves quickly in
government, let alone in international affairs. Others need to see this, we need to get their
opinions, we need to compare this with other reports: verify and corroborate, justify and
authenticate. There is a lot we have to do. But you have done a splendid job. But right
now, if you dont mind, I need you to look at these transactions with China
Sir, with all due respect, not only are weapons being transported to these
countries, but nothing else, nothing that would be useful to a new nation of people trying
to build a modern life. We are taking rubber and ivory and replacing that with bullets and
bayonets. This is not trade, sir, this is looking like a massacre
Understood. Loud and clear, he said. Please, have your assistant take these new
records and begin your work on this new mess in the Orient. I will get back to you on
this. Good solid work though. The Minister of War was correct in his assessment of you.
The Minister of War?
Yes, the one who recommended you for this position.
I never knew him sir.
Well, he knew you. Thank you again.

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It was a long ride home that night on the Underground.

What do you mean you quit? my wife screamed at me.
I cannot work there. Not with what I have seen.
But what are we going to do now? I mean, that was such a good job, you will be
blacklisted now for ever.
There is something more going on, I said. They are not just interested in data.
They plan to use it somehow. For what I dont know. But it is not for anything good.
But why did you quit? Why not ask to be transferred, be put someplace where
your work doesnt matter. People like you, they would have done something. But you
quit!
I thought you would understand.
I I cant help you any more!
I didnt know what that meant, but I told her I had already applied for a readers
position at the local university. I still had the recommendation of my professor who had
secured me the job at the Dept of Military and so I was sure to get the school job. It did
not pay as well, but I could also tutor in my spare time. Mathematics is the key to the
future, I told my wife, which means every rich family in town is going to want their kids
to be instructed in that future. We had nothing to worry about, I assured her, I was going
to be in demand.
* * *

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Finally, for the first time since I began work at the Oscillator, I was to meet Dr.
Zs grandson, Olaf. We stood at the glass door to Olafs study for a few moments before
Dr. Z took his hand off the knob and turned to me.
Have I told you about Olaf? he asked.
Only that he is the son of your daughter, I said.
Yes, he said slowly, my daughter was a very bright woman, probably could have
gone on to do many things, perhaps anything that she wanted. But after her mother died,
all she really wanted to do was leave home, grow up, be an adult. A shame, I thought, as a
child has so little time to begin with, what affliction is it to make them want to abandon
childhood sooner then necessary.
I did not understand what was going on, I suppose I did some things wrong,
some things I would change now, but all I did was increase her rebellion. So she took off
with a young man, a soldier. They got married. I dont know where they were living.
Then one day, not long after their elopement, I received word the young man had been
killed. An accident they said. She was left pregnant with Olaf, but she refused to come
see me, she refused to accept my help. Suddenly a few months ago, Olaf appears at our
doors with a letter on him asking that I care for him for a while. Of course I took him in.
I took him in as my grandson and I took him in with a heart that hopes some day she too
will come in through that door.
Perhaps Dr. Z could not know from the look on my face, as the chances of this
happening were just too great to be imaginable. Even I looked for the odds that it was
not true, could it really be that I was living with his daughter.

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Dr. Z opened the glass door and led me into the study where the child, as always
I saw him, was bent diligently over a book. The sweet smell of sickness was heavy in the
room, perhaps a balm applied to the boys chest, or simply the smell of decay, I was not
sure. It was not the repellant smell of death, but still pungent on the senses, and
unpleasant in its connotation that something was not well, that decay had wrapped itself
about bone and organs and was not letting go.
Olaf, he announced, I want you to meet your new tutor.
The boy looked up and for the first time I fully saw his face. It was a face not
only of illness but of malformations produced by other, deeper causes. His chin was
small and perhaps because of that, his mouth was narrowed and the teeth that I could see
arranged in a haphazard way as if fighting for what position was available in that limited
maw. His cheek bones were oddly prominent, the cheeks below were collapsed and
deeply pocked as was this thin neck and around his protruding ears. His forehead was
low and sharply lined as if at his young age he was already burdened by worries far
beyond his years. His hair was dark and nappy, indeed I had no idea as to what lineage
would have produced this child. Finally his hands were small and dainty, blue veined and
beginning to show signs of an arthritic condition. Here was a boy who was barely in his
teens, yet manifesting signs of old age.
The boy smiled at me, which caused his eyes to narrow much like a cat will
squint when purring. I looked at Dr. Z who seemed to be waiting for one of us to take the
next step in this conversation. I waited then said:
Hi Olaf, I am glad to finally meet you.
I am pleased to meet you sir, Olaf said in a small voice.

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Olaf, I want you to give your tutor the upmost of your attention as he only has a
limited time each day to work with you. Can you promise me that you will work with
him and do you best?
Yes, Pappa.
Good, Olaf, Dr. Z said, so I will leave you two for about an hour. Is there
anything I can get you before I leave, he said to me.
No, I am fine, I answered. And he walked out, closing the door behind him.
I pulled up the other chair in the room and sat down at the desk.
You are working on algebra I see.
Yes.
I was told you need some help.
I am really having no problems with this, Olaf said.
I couldnt help noticing that some of the sores on his face were new, swollen
and ready to burst. My first reaction was to believe he had pox, but Dr. X had told me
that he was not contagious. Still I could not bring myself to touch either the table or any
of the items that were in the room.
What are you having problems with? I asked him.
Differentials, he replied. I am not able to solve certain problems and do not see
how one finds the way to devise an answer.
And so within the first few moments together we had reached an impasse. I had
assumed we would take on the simple problems of math, geometry, long division,
algebraic expressions. With all of these I could have found ways to help him, to extend
our meetings so that Dr. Z would not be disappointed. Instead, I was faced with the

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challenge that would immediately expose me for the imposter I was. I could solve these
problems for Olaf, but I knew that I would never be able to instruct him in how to
approach these problems himself. The answer would come to me through methods I
could sketch out on the board or on paper, but I could never explain the path, neither the
beginning nor the process that took me to the end. It would come easily sometimes, other
times I would feel the sweat in my palms, then I would feel the tightness in my chest, the
dizziness in my head, I would sometimes even feel my bowels tighten and pull in upon
my other organs, and only release their grip when I finally placed the final answer on the
board. But these displays, which earned me the reputation of brilliance in school, had no
utility when trying to teach youth how to be a mathematician.
Without looking at my expression of hopeless concern, Olaf took up his lead
and sketched out a problem at the top of a clean piece of paper.
Here, he said, is a problem that I have been trying to solve.
I recognized the equation, or maybe its sister, and could see the answer even if
the steps to get there were beneath a muddy current of thoughts.
Watch, he said. And so he began to sketch out a progression of symbols that I
could neither recognize nor follow, but quickly he created a pathway that ended with the
same answer I would have produced. I looked at him with sudden awe.
See, he said, I seem to come to an answer, but I do not understand how I did
this, I cannot see how I got to this conclusion and so how can I believe this answer is
correct.
It is correct, I said.
But how do I know? he asked me again.

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You have to trust yourself, I said, suddenly filled with sympathy that had
nothing to do with his disfigurement and unsightly features, or his debilitating sickness.
Here was a boy who had the same gifts as I, a gift that would neither serve him nor help
him survive.
I took a pen from my pocket and careful not to touch my hand on the paper,
drew out another equation, one that I knew was much more difficult than his example.
Do not write anything, I said, look at this and tell me what you think the answer
might be.
How can I do that? He asked.
Just try.
I cant, this problem is too hard. I have never even tried a problem of such
difficulty.
Look at it until you think you have an answer. I am going to leave you with this
so that I can complete some things with your grandfather. Let me know when you have
an answer.
I turned away from the boy who had bent his head over the problem I had
offered him. I needed to make sure. If he had my gift, he would find the answer,
although it would take him some time. If I returned in a half hour or so if he was
beginning to make his way to the solution, he would indeed be blessed with the same
mental disfigurement that I had.
In the meantime, I needed to regroup, perhaps even tell Dr. Z that I was not the
right tutor. I was about to open the door and leave this sweltering room of sickness, when
Olaf spoke in his tiny voice.

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Sir? He said, I got it sir.

* * *

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A few weeks later I received a letter from the university. They had turned me
down with no reason, no explanation. Perhaps my wife was right, I had been blacklisted.
My only option now was to tutor students privately. Instructing children nearly
drove me back to drink. Not that I needed much assistance or direction in these efforts.
First of all, I cannot teach what I dont understand in the first place. And so I was a
terrible tutor. Fortunately, parents did not know this for at least two or three months; in
other words, not until their test scores came back and I was revealed. The most spiteful
parents were the poor Jews who when I had not properly prepared their kids for an exam
would literally greet me with a long list of epithets in their language, understandable only
by the vehemence with which they were flung on me. Women would shake rags at my
face while the men would holler and punch the sky with their fists. I knew the reason for
this outrage and did not blame them a bit. These Jewish families were often the very
poorest of my clients and unlike the Irish and English families, they did not spend their
few extra coppers on beer or tobacco, this went to educate their kids. Their kids too were
committed to this task with a dedication I did not see in the best students of the wealthiest
families. And so, when they found out they were wasting their few pennies on me, their
anger was totally justified.
For the first few years, I could find enough new students to make up for the ones I
lost, until eventually it was common knowledge across a wide portion of K that I was a
tutor to avoid at all costs. And so my income dwindled, our water was turned off, milk

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was no longer being delivered, our credit at the store was cut off. It was time to move
again.
My wifes mood had improved slightly, despite our misfortunes. She had been
good for me through these years, kept me pretty straight and narrow. I wish I could say I
reciprocated or provided her with some additional virtues beyond her own, but sadly that
is not the case. The basic things that a husband is supposed to provide to his wife, I have
failed. I have not been able to manage a steady job, she has more than many times had to
go to her aunt in the country for loans which we can never repay, those loans now getting
smaller and smaller so that when she returns she has but a pound or two in her purse,
enough to last maybe a month at most if we do not eat too much meat. Consequently, we
have had to move to cheaper and cheaper environs. And with that downturn, I have failed
to provide her with a safe, sanitary and clean place to live.
Now we are in a block dwelling on Ginger Street, dark, quite ugly as these
buildings built and managed by philanthropists tend to be. These row houses were meant
to provide a suitable workmens dwelling, and so is lacking in many of the amenities that
we had in other dwellings, such as bright light in our rooms, our own privy and baths on
our floors. Most disturbing to my wife is the need to take a hot bath at the public bath, an
exercise I rather enjoy as no one is more gentile and loquacious than at the baths, the kind
of companionship you could also find at the pubs but I did not venture there anymore.
As I was not working my wife had taken a job at a seamstress sweat, a terrible
place she told me, the windows closed and sealed, the shades drawn, the air filled with
dust and fibers. The strain of the work was making her fingers stiff and she feared she
would lose the ability to play piano if she had to continue holding and pulling a needle so

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many hours a day. So she quit the sweat and then she tried giving piano lessons to the
neighbors, but spent most of her time trying to collect from the drunk parents while
getting attached to the kids. In addition to all this, she had her activism meetings at night
and all through her days off.
As if I did not have enough to feel inadequate about, around this time she tells
me she is pregnant.
* * *

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As I was saying, severed hands from the Congo became a sort of currency. Each
right hand proved a killing. Soldiers who collected the most hands were sent home early.
Laborers who failed to meet their rubber collection quota had both their hands cut off.
Often the soldier left eh handless victim to survive or die. Some survivors pretended to
be dead, not moving even when their hands were severed.

After 1908, hands rarely appeared in Cubist paintings.

* * *

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Dont worry about such things, Dr. Z said to me.

I had told him I may not be the right tutor for his grandson.
I am not sure you understand, I said, there may be a real problem with me tutoring
this boy. I dont think you should entrust me with that task.
What are you saying? If nothing else, Olaf will enjoy your company. He has a
peculiar mind, you will begin to notice that right away. I think you will be a perfect
source of inspiration for him. But lets just take it one day at a time right now.
We were walking away from the study.
With all the talk these days about the role the shape of the skull and the placement
of the features on the face have in determining our future aptitudes towards degeneracy, I
am afraid Olaf would be recommended for if not simply institutionalized if I as much as
tried to admit him to school. Worse yet is the speed by which these fleeting scientific
ideas have made their way into the preconceptions even the children have. Ours is not a
welcoming world out there for someone like Olaf.
We were again climbing the spiral staircase back to the observation deck. I did
not think I had the energy to make this climb again, but Dr. Z was already several turns
up the staircase before I could venture a complaint. He quickly changed subjects back to
the Oscillator.

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What I have been able to understand of the Oscillator is based solely on looking at
the surface, he continued, studying the patterns and movements across the upper most
level of this system. I cant actually follow the paths of decision making, I have no idea
if what I see is truly related to the process of processing information, but I have no other
explanation for it. This has led me to revisit the very concept of causality, which Mr.
Hume has already done so well for us. Science seems obsessed with causation as the
ultimate arbiter of knowledge, but maybe causation is not necessary at all, perhaps
causation is simply a shortcut we have created to talk about things with fewer words.
I have tried looking at the level of the computors themselves. We gave them rules
but who is to say they have not implanted their own sets of rules? But like you I see the
same thing: a man or a woman who is engaged in a task. I can look more closely and
detail what that task is, it could be looking through a register, it could be pulling a lever
to make a calculation on their machine, it could be writing with their pencil, it could be
scratching their head, drinking a cup of coffee. But these individual behaviors of the
computor tell me nothing. I cannot link up all the pencil writing of all the computors and
create an explanation based on that. And what if pencil writing has no role in the
information processing itself, what if it is more a measure of down time, relaxation.
Maybe they are just doodling. Do you see my dilemma?
So studying the tasks and looking for causes and effects between them makes no
sense, looking at each individual offers no resolution. That is when I stepped back and
looked across the entire floor. And that is when I began to see the faint and the not so
faint patterns in that vast surface. And that is when I realized I had a vision that Hume

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never had to support his arguments. What I saw was a nature that cared less about this
thing humans called causation. It worked just fine without it.
We had finally reached the deck and I was nearly doubled over in pain.
You now have a broader understanding of it all. But bear with me so that I can
show you where the real power lies. Like right now, you can clearly see those areas of
activity over to the west, right?
Looks like a small storm, I huffed.
Exactly, a small dark storm. But if you look carefully in other areas you will see
other smaller, fainter storms, some of them a lot larger than that one, see look north.
I had to admit I could not see anything. I was feeling faint.
You need to pull back, dont look into the masses, pull back a bit as if you were
looking at something just above the surface and not in the surface itself. Look into the
grids, the wires, what do you see?
I am not sure hey, yes, I think I got it! I see now. Up there, a large dark
rippling pool of gray.
Exactly! Keep looking and you will spot others. Many more actually. You will
being to see not just circles but waves, you will see ripples, and then you will see straight
lines suddenly appear like a vein filling with blood, then that vein emptying again,
disappearing. You will see a sudden tempest start to grow, then suddenly a smaller pool of
activity in another area will burst into action and as if communicating across the surface,
the larger storm begins to fade, slow down. I have begun to think that these spots and
waves and storms and lines are the true computational processes, even though I know
they were related simply to changes in the activity of the people, perhaps a way they bend

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their heads or turn their bodes, or reach out with their arms. I think, no I am sure, that in
these oscillations, in their interactions and in their temporal structures is how the
calculations are done. The information is spread out over hundreds if not thousands of
individuals, it is sent across the entire Oscillator in these swells and roils, thousands of
units carrying this information in some form of processing hitherto unknown to any of us.
And so with unknown speed, and unknown power, this system, this system of
subsystems, this supersystem of many systems, calculates on a scale never before
achieved, perhaps never achieved in our universe.
I have of course carried out some studies of my own, accumulated data and
hypotheses that I have kept to myself, correlations which you may find startling but that I
am willing to share with you, should you be interested. For example, I have spent many
hours and days up here studying these patterns below. I have noticed that many of these
events have a frequency that remains fairly consistent to the type of event. The smaller
storms and spots actually vibrate with a higher frequency, which I call the primary waves.
The dark patches that seem to well up simultaneously and move across the surface, then
disappear just as quickly, they have a lower frequency, the secondary waves. The larger,
fainter seas of activity have slow, rambling frequencies which I call the tertiary waves.
More dramatically and perhaps rather mysteriously, I believe I can show that the
floor of the Oscillator is not uniform, not at all. Even though that was our intention, it
seems to have organized itself into self-functioning but intercommunicating areas, I
almost want to call them units. In the very middle, you will begin to see over time that
the secondary waves I talked about will arise in patterns that suggest what is turning on
and off those waves is something in that middle area. Tertiary waves can be seen forming

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first in one area such as the Northwestern quadrant then shifting to the other side, the
north eastern quadrant. Between those you will see the veins of darkness appear and
disappear as if feeding the information across a callosum. It is fascinating.
You noticed earlier this tracing grid, he said as he pulled a wheeled contraption
across the counter. I created this as a way to draw the patterns in the Oscillator. The
canvas is a translucent wax paper with these grid lines. I can pull this across my view
like this, and with a charcoal pencil quickly sketch in the patterns of oscillation down
below. Then I can take the wax paper out and lay it on top of a drawing I had made at
another time, and look, you can see how the patterns have changed. Compare it with
another drawing and they look almost the same. My next goal, if there is time, is to get a
hundred or so artists up here, sketching the patterns every few minutes, creating a series
of pictures of the activity, which can then be shot on film and made into a movie, giving
us a movie of these thoughts I mean computational processes in time.
Dr. Z put down the drawings and walked back towards the stair case. He turned
back around.
Oh wait, you see the grids of wires strung over the heads of the computors.
Originally these were used to hang incandescent lights so as to illuminate the floor. We
used the large cone-shaped light fixtures which hung from the wires but we were never
able to gain a consistent illumination. The lights would rise and fall in illumination,
waver in these pulses that seemed to follow a pattern across the floor. The metal light
fixtures themselves would vibrate and hum. In other words, something from the floor
was interfering with the flow of electricity in the overhead wires. The fact is, I had
unwittingly created a device that would interact with the energy being created by the

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Oscillator. I took out the incandescent bulbs, they were blowing out too often anyway
with all the voltage fluctuations, and with a wire attached a cathode ray tube to each of
these lamps. Let me show you.
He pulled a large wooden drawer out from under the counter. Mounted to this
drawer were hundreds of cathode tubes. He pulled down a large switch and the spiral
coils in tubes began to glow. One tube flashed and blew out.
Remember what I said about building a machine Oscillator. Each day one of
these tubes blows out. I figured I would need about ten times as many lamps hanging
over the floor and just as many tubes to get the information that I would really need. But
then I figured I would be spending all my time replacing tubes, not learning anything. If
I wanted to be a janitor, I could do what I am doing now. Indeed, I have thought of
designing a miniaturized version of one of these to see if the electrical activity in the
brain recently found in animals by Adolf Beck was similar to what we see in the
Oscillator. Can you imagine if it was? Similar that is?
He laughed. Clearly, it takes a few minutes for the tubes that are still working to
warm up. Adolf Beck is a fascinating man. I have never met him but I would like to, he
is truly fearless I believe. He not only was able to show that the animal brain created
these electrical patterns, but he wrote papers on things like The Sense of Taste in a
Tongueless Man and How to Create Colorblindness, and Dreams and Their Causes.
Nothing limited his curiosity, certainly not fear. Ah, here we go. See they are starting to
blink or pulse? What you see here is a small map of the entire floor out there. See how
each tube glows with a spiral display when viewed from on top? Some spiral clockwise,
others counter clockwise. Know why?

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No idea.
Me neither. I need a lot more connections to give us any useful information about
what is really going on down there but you get the idea, right?
I said I did even though I didnt. I couldnt help but notice the smile on his face
as he watched the pulsing lights, the grossly rendered movements of activity whatever
it was that he believed was the key to solving all the worlds problems whatever they
were.
But what about the weather? Where are you in predicting the weather?
Ha, he laughed, look down there, what do you see? Storms, cyclones, waves,
ripples. What is it you see huh?
I dont know.
Its weather, he said, that is weather! You yourself called this oscillator a giant
brain of pencil pushers right? Think about it. What if the mind was but a series of
weather patterns in our heads? Do you see? We have seen the similarity between our
brains and the weather for centuries!
I see that, I see the similarities, but I dont see what you are looking for. I dont
see what you built the Oscillator to do?
And what was that?
To give you answers. Where are the answers?
Answers! Again, you and your need for answers! Why is there so much
similarity between the Oscillator and the weather? Why are there connections between
the weather and our minds? Is it because they are one and the same?
I guess so

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Heavens no! Is it because there is something in the world, something in how the
elements of the world are organized that are shares between mind, Oscillator, and
weather? Yes! It is not an answer that gives us insight but the questions! Perhaps we can
study one and understand the other. They are not the same but they share the same stuff
of the universe and from there we can now find answers!
I have a feeling, he said, that there is so much that can be discovered if only we
had the time and resources to study this. Yet at the same time, I also fear that the
Oscillator is evolving, perhaps even faster than we can hope to study it, and so it will
always be far ahead of even our most heroic efforts to come to grips with what is going
on down there.
Dr. Z now started back down the stairway and I was beginning to feel as if this
climbing and descending these stairs was just another oscillation taking place in the
Oscillator. But at least we were going down now.
The real shame of having the Oscillator shut down is that there is no real
understanding of this wave activity. We know the inputs and the outputs with certainty.
But we have no real idea of what goes on in between those two events. Despite my
skepticism about machines, perhaps someone will in fact be smart enough to create
something similar with levers and switches and gears so that we can take those things
apart and see what really is going on mechanical things which are not nearly as
threatening to the powers that be. No one would ever think that machines would threaten
or take over the world.
I found an excuse to stop this dizzying descent. Despite the ringing in my ears, I
had heard Dr. Z say something I needed to understand.

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What do you mean, shut this down?

Ah yes, he said, stopping and turning to look up at me. I was going to tell you this
eventually. He resumed his descent.
At first I did indeed think of this as simply a giant calculator, a big abacus really.
All I had done was increase the number of beads and the number of fingers flipping beads
or punching keys, thereby increasing the calculating time and power arithmetically. In
other words giving us 64,000 times the computing power of a single person. Not a bad
thing to strive for. But what we didnt know is that the computational power would grow
not in a line, but in a curve, by powers far beyond what we would have ever expected. In
other words, we have discovered that 64,000 beings can perform millions if not billions
of calculations in the time it takes one person to complete one on his own. It is mind
boggling really. What on earth has that amount of computing power? What in our
universe would ever be capable of such processing ability?
And the energy that is produced. You can feel it cant you? You cant not! We are
taught that if there is one inviolable law in all of physics, it is the second law of
thermodynamics, all activity leads to an increase in entropy. But are we not seeing a
violation of that law here? How can we measure how much energy is coming into the
Oscillator and how much is being expensed? How can we be certain that something, a
new energy is not being created which does not require the consumption of more energy
in its creation? How can we know that? Certainly if we starved all the people and
deprived them of water they would die and the Oscillator would die with them. But that
does not answer the question of what is being produced and how much is going in?

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And why do I ask? Think of this. On any Sunday, the stadium fills to capacity
with people thereto watch a football match. Standing in there with them, yes you can feel
the energy, you can hear the noise and you can smell the odors of human beings in
different states of excitement, fatigue and disappointment. But let me ask you, do you
ever feel anything like this? Do you ever feel such energy, such excitement and look! the
computors are not jumping and shouting and waving like the idiots at a football stadium,
not, they are expending a mere fraction of the energy those football fans do! You see, the
computors are calmly working at their desks, exerting no more energy than any other
office worker, yet feel the energy, look at the activity, see the patterns, the oscillations
order requires more energy than random disorder. There is an energy being produced that
creates this order and it is this energy that I wonder is outside the Second Law. We are
violating the laws of the universe. And that leads me to wonder if we are not witnessing
something even more magnificent.
Such as? I asked. He stopped and looked up to answer me.
The stirrings of consciousness!
* * *

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But I thought you didnt want to have children, I asked tentatively.

I didnt. And I dont.
Then how did this happen.
Oh, I dont know, she said. I have ruled out immaculate conception, as I quit
my jovial repartee with God long ago and I doubt he would do this just to get my
attention again. But Im worried a bit about Mr. Courtney getting caught the other day
wanking off in the baths. Mary does not do the best job scrubbing the tubs you know.
So what do you really think?
Maybe one of your little buggers weaseled its way in. Youve been sneaking a
muffin when Im asleep for some time now.
Thought you were asleep.
Thought you liked it that way.
So sure, I can plant the seed, but can I support and it and help it grow? With her
announcement, she took to traveling back to the countryside to stay with her aunt, who
was only too happy to accept her now that she was with child. So she was gone nearly
every weekend, sometimes longer. I agreed with her that the air in our room and the
general atmosphere in town was not one that she wanted our wee one taking in.
So, I now had a great deal of time to myself. Which was fine with me. I was
alone and idle and so got to listen to the banter and other sounds of life around me. As

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you might imagine, I came to know the sounds of my neighbors in rather intimate detail.
At five oclock Id hear the tenant overhead, Mr. A, get up and get ready for his day at
work. His wife, who does dressmaking, had been up with her sewing machine going until
one in the morning. So I surmise they spend little time together in their bed. Perhaps, I
wonder, it is so small they swap times to sleep. He is a carman at the railroad company
and so he is soon out the door. Before he leaves though every morning I then hear the
sound of a child cry, and the voice of a now sleeping Mrs. A who ask him to get the child
some tea and crust. By the sounds of his heavy but hurried footsteps he obeys, I guess
and then he is out the door. These noises seem to dutifully wake my wife and so my time
alone is briefly interrupted.
Shortly after my own wife leaves for her roundabouts, I then hear the terrible
scraping against our northern wall, the sound of Mrs. B who is raking and cleaning her
stove. Then a door opens on the balcony, the dust is thrown down the dust shoot and a
conversation began between Mrs. A and Mrs. B, usually Mrs. B having something to say
about Mrs. A being up so late at night with her sewing. But the conversation is pleasant,
even if the meaning is not.
A little later I hear the older children of the As get up and get ready for school.
There is the usual scuffles and squeals between siblings fighting over crusts or jam. The
chaos of dressing and gathering books, and then with the slam of a door it all falls back to
the most incredible quiet as I imagine Mrs. A has climbed back to her bed, having
shuttled her brood out for the day. At ten, Mrs. A gets up again and I can hear her dress,
put on her boots and then she too leaves to make her sundry purchases. Before she leaves
however, she engages on the front porch in a brisk conversation with Mrs. C who is

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sweeping her stoop. There is a quick reference to a spiteful old woman a reference I
assume to Mrs. B
All is quiet until about twelve when there is a great deal of clamor as the
children all returned home from school. There is a lot of running about, clattering and
shouting and making fun which of course is punctuate by the sudden screams and cries of
a younger one who has fallen or received a strong twist of the hair. Soon the mothers call
all the children to dinner and following that a certain torpor falls over the building,
broken only by the clinging cans and cat calls of the afternoon milk boys. But this is the
favorite time of the women to catch up on each other and I Can catch fragments of
conversations ranging from certain people whose illnesses have turned bad to the
shocking bad temper of a little girl in the building who torments all the children here, to
the gossip about husbands and the goings on heard and made up. Looking out the
window I can watch a game of cricket between the kids, often a tad of girls up against a
team of boys. The wickets are chalked up against the wall and a soft ball issued. The
game however, collapses when the boys, who are smaller, refuse to go on saying it isnt
fair. The girls join each other in a triumphant dance but then walk away unsatisfied.
Some evenings we can all go to our balconies and catch a row between a man
and his wife, looking down on the spectacle like theatergoers looking at a stage. After it
is over, the spectators weigh in with their opinions as to who got the best of whom, but
the incident like all things here is soon forgotten.
Very soon the savory smells of tea begin to float in and about the buildings.
The favorite meal of the day is being prepared for the husbands return. The children all
wash they hands in the water off the balcony, rooms are tidied. Often, once of the women

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will send their oldest child to my door with a plate of food, knowing it seems that my
wife will not be back to make me my dinner. In the evening some of the men go out to
the neighborhood pubs and sing or talk politics, but Mr. A stays home and does
gymnastics with his kids before putting them to bed, after which he reads from the gossip
pages of the newspaper, as if such drivel needed repeating. My wife often retuned shortly
after dinner, her apologies for not making mine are no longer required or offered. We sit
with teas and talk about our days, I of course have the most to offer as it has been as busy
as ever. At 9 pm, all is quiet, until Mrs. A begins her nightly work on the sewing
machine, a sound which by now lulls me to sleep.
Not infrequently, we are aroused from our sleep by a husband or sometimes a
wife, who has been locked out of the house for coming home too late. To the repeated
shouts and knocks and entreaties, the spouse inside the house maintains a sullen silence.
Finally, the person outside begins to scream and kick at the door, waking everyone in the
building, and then he or she is let in. Not one of us neighbors make the least bit of a sign,
it was unspoken etiquette to ignore these outbursts, probably because your turn would
one day come.
All in all, living here was not unpleasant. I felt that if I were old and informed,
this is where I would want to be, surrounded by nosey neighbors, someone always with
an eye on me, a plate of food arriving just when I needed the company these seemed to
be great advantages over the lack of privacy, the need to walk two blocks to the public
bath, and the gossip and quarreling. We are social beings after all, our faculties designed
to operate more fully when surrounded and enmeshed with other people, our behavior
moderated, our sense of self stabilized when we know our place and have a position we

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recognize among others. I never argued with my wife about these philosophical issues,
she began to despair that I had no ambition to stop our downward slide.
Going to a new neighborhood was always an adventure for me. For my wife it
represented simply another dropped rung on the ladder. I took great interest and delight
in getting to know my neighbors, going to lengths actually to get some kind of tag on
each and every home I could. On Ginger Street for example, I wrote down the following:
Lower floor. Tenement No. 1 is occupied by Williams, a laborer who is laid up
with rheumatics. This family is very poor. He has a wife and four children, three of
whom are at school and all are sickly. Wont get a smile out of any of them. Shadows on
these faces as if just waiting for the final knell. Very sad. In No. 2 lives Paxey, a tailor
helped by his wife, who is also caretaker for the block. So they have their rooms rent free
and as a result they are comfortably well off. The have six children, three at work and
three at school. No 3 is a single room occupied by a young couple who have just moved
in . Seem respectable but shy to socialize. In No 5 there is Sweeny, a laborer, with wife
and four children. Very poor but proud. Dont want charity. No 6 is occupied by Rowe
who is ill and out of work. His wife also does not work. They have no children but are in
distress. Passing to the first floor, in No. 7 lives Byrne, a laborer, who is in good work,
with his boy who also works and four younger children at school. His wife does not
work. Fairly comfortably off. At No. 8 is Ormon, another laborer with his wife and four
children. A comely crew, dont talk much to others. Poor but not as poor as others. In
No 9 lives Towers a waterside laborer, who used to do better work until he lost a thumb
and does not do well at this. His wife worked pulling fur, but has been very ill, blaming
the factory and the lack of ventilation. Went on a drunk for a few days and has been very

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ill ever since. One boy is at work and three children are at school. A big girl stays at
home to what the young one. In No 10 lives North, a laborer when it seems he can get
work, but doing very little generally. His wife is with child and very sick. Extremely
poor. No 11 is occupied by Haresoft, another laborer, doing little. The man is deaf and
drinks a great deal. His wife makes hassocks and there are two children at school. The
wife went hopping and took all the children with her. While she was away he did not pay
the rent and so when she got back she had back rent to pay.
On the second floor lived an old man who makes toys and such things out of
wood, working at home. A friend lived and world with him and had a older daughter.
These people are not communicative but look very poor. In No. 14 lives Sutton, a laborer,
with regular work, but he drinks and so they are poor. No 15 is occupied by David, a
man out of work. His wife is a well educated woman but much degraded by drink. There
are two grown up sons at work and two children at school. The men dare not give the
woman any money and are afraid to leave anything in place lest she pawn it when they
are out. In No. 16 lives Packington, a waterside laborer, with wife, one boy at work, and
four children at school. The children have no boots but they have food. The man worked
during the strikes and when he returned he was outlawed and could get no work here.
He then took to picture framing.
Then we moved to the Connaught Buildings. And this is what I wrote there.
No 1 is occupied by an old man who gets his living as a hawker, taking his stand
near the Bank. In No 2 lives his son and wife and two children. He is also a city hawker
making his living selling pencils. His wife does charing and washing. No. 3 is a painter
with wife and five children. A soft simple sort of fellow, generally out of work. The

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family having a real hard time. In No. 4 lives woman of some property without family.
She was for many years a prostitute, and finally married an old man who has since died
leaving her his money. She purchased a house in her old haunts and let out furnished
room to girls. In No 6 is Hitchcock, a laborer, who wife does nothing but drink. No. 9 is
home of a blind beggar. In No 7 lives Edson, a knife grinder who has a regular beat. His
wife sells flowers and they have seven children, all young. A very decent family. At No 9
is Beton, a one legged man, a night watchman by trade and out sometimes with a piano
organ. In No 19 lived a deserted woman whose husband would not live with her on
account of her drinking, quarrelsome habits. She is working at a clothes factory. In No.
17 is Garthecole, a widow who make her living by street singing, and has a boy who runs
errands. No 17 is Flood, a law writer, a good workman but drinks heavily. His wife sells
flowers in the street and does very well at it. . No 37 Tonner is a general laborer, seldom
works. Wife covers umbrellas and girl helps. Another girl makes fancy boxes. Mrs.
Mullins, a widow live sin No 18, she keeps a little shop on the ground floor. Sells
groceries, candles, etc. Manages to live pretty comfortably.
Those are my notes. Over the past few years my wife and I have lived in no less
than six different dwellings, enough for me to catalogue more than a hundred lives. All
listed in tables. Not sure what good this information is, but each time I complete my
survey I feel as if I have filled in a dark unknown place on this earth and given it some
light and color. Even though, as you can see, the stories are not always cheery or
entertaining. Yet from all this that I collected on these dwellings of humanity, I could
begin to see the stirrings of patterns, of how men and women moved through these
confined spaces, coped with long hours of work, how they patterned their lives on bread

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and coins, periodically interrupted by other needs, such as talk and comfort, drink and
fights. I could begin to see how children wandered on their own rather unstable orbits,
maneuvering the danger and chaos of their environment, but as they grow, find safer,
steadier paths on which to move, until finally falling into the predictable orbits of
adulthood. There were the patterns of life during the day and the patterns at night. There
were the already shaky equilibriums easily broken by a lost job, a death, an illness, a
drunken father, a meandering wife. But even the hardest perturbation would not be
enough to send it all out of control, life would come back, usually harder and steadier
than one would suspect, finding its regular path and settling into its old, recognizable
rhythm.
And whereas each building may be different in terms of the tenants and so the
character and demeanor, there is still a pattern as if humans have a way to adopt to life,
especially to the close proximity, the lack of privacy, the sharing of facilities, which I
cannot begin to understand; but it has to do with something both ancient and modern in
us. Ancient in that we had to have evolve some rudimentary means of communicating, of
creating space for ourselves, of producing behaviors that would diminish the risk of
killing and destroying each other, and creating a living hell. Yet modern at the same time
in that these dwellings, this city life, the smoke filled clouds, the open sewers, the
inability to grow food, to find food, the need to go out and do whatever to survive, to
make a living from bits of rags and whatever moxie you can find in your tired, ill
nourished body, those are the traits of a modern man, not Darwins animals.
In some way I have consoled myself that these frequent moves have given me an
opportunity. I have had the fortune so to speak to visit many venues that I could note and

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compare. But what I was beginning to find out was that my reputation as a tutor was
spreading wider and wider. After each move, I could usually find good work in the new
area for several months. But now, we were being forced to take up residence in the
lowest quality dwellings, as we had little money for key fees and landlords were asking
for deposits on unshared flats. In these degraded environments I was lucky to find a few
new pupils if any at all and my time with them was shorter than ever. We were living a
life that no human being should be asked to visit. I couldnt justify anything anymore.
Not when my inabilities were causing so much trouble, so much pain to someone I loved.
And so it was during this period when all seemed hopeless that I received the
letter from Dr. Z.

* * *

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As I was saying, this saturnalia of gore was taking place near my in the shadows
of two death houses: the hospital and the slaughterhouse.

Dr. Jekyll drinks a potion that transforms him into the sexual predator he wished
he could be.

A lipksi in a leather apron, a foreigner of dark complexion, his face being of a

marked Hebrew type, Jacob the Ripper.

Pasteur was a human vivisectionist.

One year after Mr. Hyde first appeared on stage, a woman was brutally murdered
in mocking reality. Said Pablo to Stein: motion pictures will never be the same.

* * *

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We had reached the lower floor once again. Dr. Z seemed completely unaffected
by our quick descent while I was so dizzy I had to grip the stair banister to steady myself.
Through the glass walls we could see some of the computors working at their desks, the
edge of a vast and uniform sameness that stretched to the horizon.
Can we begin to say that the Oscillator has its own consciousness, Dr. Z asked,
and if so what does such a statement mean? Does it mean it has a soul? How about free
will? Or is it gaining a state of self knowledge, is it capable of directing itself in the
processing of information? At what point does it grasp control of the process and we lose
control? Has it already? If it had succeeded in self organizing into a superior computing
system, who is to say where that self organization stops? Is all this speculation in fact
absurd given that it is made up of a group of human beings each of which has their own
free will? Can you create a larger, more powerful free will from smaller free will
elements?
Indeed, I am hardly a dispassionate observer, I am more a father, and so I may be
reading far too much into what I see below me. But I swear there are days when I can
recognize in those faint patterns something vaguely human if only a tinge of irritability,
a sense boredom, a desire, a reaching out, a hint of frustration. And it fills me with a
certain sadness to see this, as I realize that whatever stage of awareness the Oscillator is
in, it is the only one of its kind, there is only one of it, no more. What kind of loneliness

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must that be? And when you think about it, self awareness only comes about when there
is awareness and interaction with others. And it has none. It is alone and cannot know
itself. What greater loneliness is there than that?
Dr. Z fumbled in his coat pocket and pulled out a pipe which he put into his
mouth then took it out again to scrape the bowl with a small metal knife.
To answer your question. It is for these very reasons that the Oscillator is being
shut down. Thats right. We are living in undecided times. There was the defeat of the
Russians by tiny Japan and now a revolution against our dear friend the Czar (he said
with obvious facetiousness). We can now fly in the air like birds. Freud has convinced us
that dreams are the logic to our unconscious. And now a young man named Einstein asks
us to follow his dreams and see space and time in strange new ways. Throughout our
Europe things are beginning to change in the upper echelons of power, a reorganization is
taking place, with potential consequences that look rather storm-like to this old scientist.
And it is the sponsors who are threatened by what we have created here. We grew too
fast, proved too much. Some people have expressed concern that we have created a super
being that has powers and abilities far beyond what the human race can manage. Others
are worried that this could be the ultimate weapon of war. I believe troubling times are
ahead.
Why dont you ask the Oscillator these questions? Isnt that what its for?
Ah, yes. I have thought about it. But what good is an answer if it gives you
nothing to act on? And to be honest, when you suddenly realize you have the power to
answer any and all questions, you dont begin thinking about the ones you want to ask,
you begin to think about the ones you never want to ask.

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Dr. Z continued. The Oscillator only answers the question you give it, it does not
answer the other questions that every answer then creates. But listen, the real question in
your head you must be wondering why I invited you here. I apologize I had to use the
pretence of interviewing you about tutoring my grandson. Hope you dont mind. I
wanted an alibi in case anyone asked why you were here.
An alibi?
I want someone to document this, to document all that we have done, to see with
their own eyes what we have accomplished before it is shut down. And then I want you
to see what it is when it is done, when it is gone, and when it is all lost. Someone needs
to capture this. It cant be me. No one would believe me, nor will they let me talk. I will
probably be banished somewhere, who knows where, wherever it is that people go when
they are no longer supposed to talk.
He produced a bag of tobacco and filled his pipe.
But this is all I have in my life, this is all I have to contribute to the world. And
soon it will disappear. And you see I cannot survive without it. So that is why I need
someone who is unattached, someone who can take this experience and find a way, some
way to let the world know, even if it is long after everything has vanished.
What exactly do you want or expect from me?
This is the hardest part. I want you to do nothing, just observe. Remember. And
just leave it in your head. It will in fact be too dangerous for you to write anything down.
Simply take all this into your mind, as much as you can.
I was infuriated. I had been chosen to save this mans dream. And, it just dawned
on me, this was my job!

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With me? You started this with me? How did you think I would be a candidate
for such a thing? How did you pick me? What did you even know about me? What is the
purpose?
I didnt pick you. The Oscillator picked you. Along with its recommendation
was a copy of a monograph you printed years ago on the weather. An interesting little
paper, some astute observations. Of course you made your conclusions based on an
understanding of these equations from the point of view of mechanical calculation. Yet
you saw something few have seen or admitted to seeing. That nature was nontechnical.
You probably are still struggling with how to reconcile that conclusion with your
mathematical mind.
Even if perchance I had had a rebuttal for him, he did not hesitate long enough to
allow me to state it.
I need you, he said. We never talked about your pay, I apologize. Can we say
forty shillings a week? Will that suffice?
Dumbfounded, I took the coins he held out to me. He gave me twice what I had
expected.
And as for the purpose, he continued, I guess we will find out at some later day
wont we. Maybe in a few minutes, maybe it will take years. We just dont know when
the answer will come.
Dr. Z answers his question (or does not answer it), leaving N concerned.
* * *

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As I was saying, perhaps because he was afraid to study the photographs too
closely, he looked to his own face this time, and splayed it open like an artichoke from
nose to mouth to eyes, triangular chunks peeled back so that what was beneath shared a
different proximate relation with what was on top, and when he go to the mouth he broke
up the shout of I am so fucking brilliant into the waves of an earthquake that were now let
loose upon the world.

With each new murder, another flap of skin was pulled across the face, as if
through these different women a flower was being carved.

He did not want to cut ties to reality. The timid Jose Vittoriano Gonzalez chose the
name Juan Gris and painted his own portrait in gray.

The coroners photos were black and white.

* * *

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I waked back outside, my mind reeling. A virtual storm was brewing inside my
skull. What had I seen? Why had I been brought here in the first place? I would have
called this man absolutely insane, but I couldnt. Not with the incredible size and beauty
of what he had created. A crazed genius perhaps? Wasnt it Nordau who said that genius
was simply another form of, a kinder manifestation of degeneration? But who else could
get 64,000 people to cooperate, to work with him? And then, his grandson, a sickly boy
of maybe thirteen. Possibly, no certainly the son of my wife, who was the daughter of the
mad man behind all this! And I had a pocket weighty down with bobs for doing what?
Nothing! No, Dr. Z was not crazy. But was I?
That was a much more poignant question. And I knew where the answer was
leading. I had some heavy coins in my pocket, and I was surrounded by the stench that
lured me in, deeper, deeper, into that darkness that I often sought, that I had fought for so
many years, but could now smell, could begin to taste, would soon feel.
Of course, I could have a beer and leave it at that. I could spend a sovereign or
two and still leave plenty for my wife to see that I was finally doing what she had wanted
me to do all along. I was working at the Oscillator and making a lot more than the poor
pencil pushers who spent their entire days at the bottom of that place. I found a public
house and grabbed a stool.
Yea mate, the bartender said.
Pint of Boddingtons, I said, my mouth actually beginning to water.

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I was about halfway through my beer, when suddenly a crowd appeared on the
streets, a mob that flowed into the pub until I found myself surrounded by men dressed
liked the computors on the floor. Drinkers were two and three deep behind me calling
out for beers, glasses of gin, shots of rum.
Amidst the chaos a guy leaned over towards me on other side of the bar and
shouted, Hey arent you the bloke who was walking the floor today?
Could have been, I answered.
Well either you was or you wasnt? None of this flowers n frolics. Not that ard
of a question I dont suppose.
Could have been me, could have been someone else. Say it was me, why do you
ask?
Maybe I just likes t ave me facts straight, China, he said. Anything wrong with
that? There is not much you can be certain bout these days y know. So if you find
something you can proscribe with a even a wee bit of clarity, well I like t take advantage
of such a rare moment. Yet it seems to me you are set on denying my attempts to find
perspicuity in life.
I am not in your way, I said. I would have gotten up to leave, but with the crowd
pushing at my back I decided I was safe where I was.
Bucky, is this bloke ere for a bull? The guy next to me asked loudly enough to be
heard throughout the bar.
Just some ampton Wick, Bucky said, and so Im oping he can watch his north n
south.
I aint causing any one any trouble. I said.

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Got some cobblers coming ere to get cream crackered.

I looked at my neighbor, his eyes squinting out of a face of mash potatoes, his lips
two slices of tomatoes looking to be split. These guys had no idea who they were
confronting with their cockney rhymes.
Leave em be, J Arthur, shouted Bucky. es no Berkshire and yer big ugly needs
all two a yer amstead eath.
To my surprise the pasty boy backed away. I was left alone with an empty glass
and not seeing much of a chance to get another one poured, not with the crowd around
me, I figured it was time to leave. So it was to my surprise when the barkeep took away
my glass, replacing it with a fresh one.
Thanks mate, I said.
Thank your new buddy over there.
My buddy was none other than Bucky, the guy who had started the jawing. I
raised my glass to his and drank it swiftly, figuring I might need the strength only a good
drink can give you. After a short while the crowd had thinned out as the men who just
wanted to grab a quick pint and then head home were gone. My buddy came over and
stood next to me. He was a short, slight fellow, not exactly the type you would expect to
see challenging blokes in a pub, not unless he had a syndicate backing him, which indeed
it seemed he was definitely entrenched here. Always the smallest ones start these things.
They instigate and then allow the goons to come in a clean up.
Dont want to get off the wrong foot with any old stranger that comes around.
Although you aint really a stranger you see.
What do you mean? I asked.

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Well, youre inside today walking the floor with the Director. You must be
someone, and if you are someone I guess I am surprised to see you sitting in ere with the
likes of us plebians. You are in with a pit of old dogs ere, gotta get your air up friend n
get ready to take a few licks.
He tossed back the rest of his beer.
Hey Mate! he shouted at the barkeep while wiping his mouth on his sleeve, a
nudder arf n arf. Bah! he said to me changing his inflection, no one will arm anyone
ere, he said. Just for fun we are.
These used to be my grounds, I said. Years back. Not this pub, but could be a
place I knew.
So what are you doing with the Director? You work for him?
Suppose you could say so.
We ear they may be making some changes on the floor. Personnel changes. You
part of something like that.
Not that I know of. It was my first week.
Yea, we eard they may be bringing in some more Jews to the floor. ey! he said
responding quickly to my glance. ard workers they are you know. Good with their eads.
He paused while he took a long draught.
Like the Director imself.
That worries you?
Well, its a good job you know. Me n my brothers, we used to work twelve
fourteen hours a day sometimes in the mills, the furnaces. I dont want to go back to that.
I like this office work. More civilized you know.

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What do you do?

You dont know?
Not really.
Process information.
What kinds?
ell if I know, mate, whatever comes to my desk. Never even pause to wonder
about it. Just pick it up, determine an answer and send it on. Dont ave time to think
about it actually. I like that about working there you know. No time to sit around and
wank your willy.
So its a good job.
ell yea. Told you that. But there are a lot of us oo are worried you know. Our
city is changing, I dont mind taking in some of these people since things seem to be
pretty rough in them other places. But they got other jobs they can do you know. This is
our town, our life. So e didnt say anything uh?
Like what?
Dont know. Forget it. Except es a kike you know. I know e built the Dome,
but es got be looking out for is people, you know what I mean. Ey! Looks like theyre
going to ave some music tonight. Lets go ave a look at it, eh Mate?
We took our beers and walked upstairs into a long dance hall. The crowd here
was quite a bit different from downstairs. A more turbulent gathering, one that youd
fancy would rather disfigure each other than waltz together across the floor. The
orchestra was penned up in a corner of the room, protected by a wire mesh from all the
bottle and cans that could be tossed by the crowd. In that pen were four bearded, shaggy

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looking Germans playing a fiddle, a cornet and two fifes. The band struck up just as we
walked in, playing in a striking extreme, the shrill notes of the fifes, the braying of the
trumpet immediately arousing the excitement of the dancers who took to the floor
whirling and waltzing with a hazardous velocity.
I noticed a young lady standing by herself along the wall, in her hands flowers for
sale. Her headscarf had been pulled down revealing a cropped head of hair. Otherwise I
could have easily mistaken her for my wife. She looked at me and smiled. Bucky
quickly captured this exchange and grabbed me by the arm.
Cmon mate, he said, none of the dollymops or flower costers. Lets find us some
women who aint got their dinner tucked neath their petticoats.
He already had his eyes on two tall, brazen faced women, dressed in gaudy colors,
dancing and pirouetting in a fantastic manner without us. He joined them anyway and
pulled me into the storm. As I turned and swirled, I would catch from time to time the
eyes of the flower girl, until one time she was gone.
After a number of songs, I was exhausted and implored Bucky to take a sit,
maybe have a smoke.
Sure, he said. Lets go. I know the place.
I threw a shilling into the musicians pen as if feeding some hogs. While they
beasts fought over the coin, I walked downstairs and out onto the streets with my new
friend. The crowd of Dome workers had all gone home, leaving the streets revealed for
what they were, a dank dreary place for the lowest of the low. Children were wandering
gaunt and hunger-stricken through the streets droning out their melancholy ditties, hoping
for a coin or piece of crust. Men stumbled blind drunk through horse shit and oily

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puddles. Women watched from doorsteps, hands out to the indifferent passersby. Seen in
this light, this many-headed mass was a problem as insoluble as that of Ks sewage,
which, feculent and festering, swings up and down the river with the ebb and flow of the
tide. Men have asked when at what point does this all tilt towards no-return? The answer
is, unfortunately, never; human beings will always find a way to layer themselves higher
on top of each other, squeeze more bodies into already crowded quarters and live in the
escalating piles of their own filth. That is what happens when you have no choice.
Paddies, Bucky said as he pushed aside the hand of a man who had followed us
since we left the pub, we are giving them back their insipid little island, so they should all
go back and live there, living like dogs here, no pride in a Mick, no shame, nothing.
Look how at em. Gotta feel sorry for the wee ones, but since when did we become a
boarding home for all the paddies, taffy, gollywogs, and pikeys of the world. Especially
the Jews, boatloads of them coming in now. And none got a farthing to their name.
We found a den and I sat down to a table. Rather than a chair, my partner took to
some rags bundled up like a pillow on the floor. There were several others in the den,
already dumb faced and stupid to the world. This place was shabby, but none too bad. On
the walls were several ink drawings that looked authentic, a couple of old photographs
behind glass of people standing stiffly for the camera. Chinese never smile in their
photos, I thought. The curtains which draped the walls and separated the proprietors flat
from the smoking area were heavy in weight and richly colored, gold and red, yellow and
black. There was a short bar where two women were talking in hushed tones. A thin
Chinaman, all sinew in his arms and neck, set up our pipe with great animation. My
buddy rolled his ball of opium, stuck it with a pin and placed it in the pipe bowl.

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Dont suppose you have heard any word about the unions have you? my partner
asked me after he had lain himself on some cushions.
Havent been around long enough, I said, but Id assume the Unions would want
in though.
They do, but the difficulty is that there is no real boss at the Dome, you know? No
management in the traditional sense. Wed be bargaining with ourselves and who knows
how well that would go. Blasted idiots we are. One thing the Union would do though,
would be to control the situation a bit more.
Control it? You mean decide who to let in and out?
In mainly.
With more than one hundred thousand people working there, seems to me you
might have a problem getting enough recruits.
Thats the problem. Its too easily not to be selective. But you cant just let
anybody walk in there. Men first, gotta give em the chance to work first. It aint the
same as working on the docks or in the mills, but we mokes been breaking our backs long
enough, we should ave the first chance at a step up, you know? Some say its making us
soft, the Dome is, but I dont need a boss ollering at me to keep me stomach tight. Then
its gotta be the folk from the city, leave the Paddies to mope around somewhere else. And
the Jews, well it aint the right place for them anyway.
Whys that?
They dont want to be mixed in with all of us. They want their own wee sweat.
Yids dont know how to socialize on the larger level. Too much into themselves.
Problem is Jews will do anything for work. They dont care. But worse though, they got

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no loyalty. None at all. So they will come into the Dome, take someones job, and then
the next thing you know they leave, found something better.
You know the saying, he continued as he heated his bowl over the lamp, every
country has the Jew it deserves. Well, we get our Jews ready made, passed on to us from
Russia and Poland with policies arseback to our own. And so they come here and set up
in their own quarters, their own governors, their own pensions.
Opium is the most marvelous of vices. Calms and dulls away any tension,
smooths away all conflicts. But even so placated I decided I simply could not listen to
this mans drivel. I was never one for confrontation, but the beer and now the poppy had
created a bond between me and this man, as artificial and as temporary as this bond may
have been, with it I suddenly found the strength to challenge him.
But surely you know that in Russia, I said, the Jews are deprived of even the most
basic rights, yet still they manage to prosper. And here he is a law abiding and self
respecting citizen of our town. Dont you agree?
Just then from the shadows of the room, the flower coster from the dance room
appeared, holding her dreary bouquet out to me. In a flash Bucky jumped up and with
the back of his hand laid the woman to the floor.
Get from ere woman, he shouted. We ave our own flowers.
I helped the poor woman back to her feet. She gave me a look of hurt that I could
have sworn I recognized, but before I could think further about it, the Chinese proprietor
had grabbed her and ushered her out with a flourish of his own piercing language.
Tell me youre a kike lover, Bucky said, sitting down and leaning back again as if
nothing had happened, go on then Mate, tell me about love. Something I dont know.

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A lot of talk these days about the Jews. Not much of it good. But look at them. In
their faces a look of stubborn patience, in their eyes an expression of hunted, suffering
animals. They watch as you approach with silent suspicion, then they move aside, make
room, gently submit. Lets face it, suffering is what the Jews have come to know and
bound by that suffering they have no where else to go but to their roots, and so they come
here and they resurrect their history, rebuild the traditions into their communities, they
build their own virtues, ones which I would say are completely alien to us, even though
we share a book. But I wont say I love the Jews, no more than I love my own mutted
race, but in these people from Russia and Poland you see the concentrated essence of
Jewish virtue and Jewish vice.
Which is first and in both cases cowardice, Buck said. They are cowards. A
paddy will fight like a dog, cuz e is a dog. A taffy will continue fighting even after es
dead, you never take on a Scot unless you plan to end your own life. The yids, they dont
fight, they dont even stand up for themselves. No wonder nobody likes em. But excuse
moi, go on with your love.
Well, have you been down by the docks when the boats arrive? There you see
some of their darker sides the Jews with all races share: the runners down there who are
among the lowest types of parasites, who push forward at the boat docks, offering
immigrants who barely understand where they are at this moment bogus tickets to
America, hawking free lodging for those who are without family or friend, clean jobs for
the young ladies. You see there too the little man from the Hebrew Ladies Society
struggling in the midst of all this human debris reaching out for the unprotected females,
he shouts to them to ignore these other offers: Go instead to the Poor Jews Temporary

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Shelter! But which of these newcomers knows who is telling what truth or what lie? It is
all a pell of confusion, shouts and counter shouts. You can hear laughter of the dock
workers who could care less what happens to a human being let it be drowned or carried
off into slavery, you hear the broken accents of the foreigners struggling to stay upright to
keep a grasp on their meager belongings, you hear the swearing of the boatmen when
they realize their peasant passengers do not have the money to pay their final passage.
Then you hve to imagine the rest. Most of these newcomers from Russia and Poland and
Budapest are taken to the back slums where they are robbed of their few possessions and
turned out to the streets destitute and friendless.
Hmmph. Survival of the tsettif they say.
Well, the lucky ones find safe quarters and begin a new life. Ive seen their
quarters, dwellings run by Jews for Jews. In exchange for a room where six sleep to a
bed. Not a complaint do you hear. They begin their worklife here not for pay but for a
cup of coffee and a hunch of brown bread. But he is smart, he is. He goes out each day
and works as hard as any learning this job whether it is pulling fur or cobbling or sewing
drapes, but he learns it well and when the time is right, even though he has not been paid
one farthing, one day he just picks up and leaves, taking with him a new skill that he can
use to go out and make money for himself and his family. Watch, within a few years he
will have opened his own shop. He will be a free man and on his way to becoming a new
capitalist, a maker of profits. He will have peasants working for him. He has moved out
of the back court where he was huddled with his other countrymen like animals and is
now comfortably installed in a model dwelling. He always moves up, never down.

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One of me model dwellings! Damn right. Not enough for us. Let alone the swej.
Me boj and me emoh. Takes him both and all! Damn kikes!
Why this anger? What does he have or do to raise our ire? Look at his home. Its
clean. He treats his wife with courtesy and tenderness, the children stay at home instead
of wandering the streets, they study the Talmud, the work on their school studies, it is
engrained in them that they have an opportunity to do better and do better they will.
Youll never see Jew at the public house, laying in these rags here with us.
Ey! Careful Mate, this here is me divan!
No, he remembers the starvation, the humiliation of being destitute. How many
of our kind accept this as our way of life? Not him and his. He will not stay at the lower
levels, he will do what it takes to improve, upward is what he always thinks, invading the
higher provinces of production that is his strategy. He has done so, he has stuck to his
course as if that was his plan from the beginning, when he got off that boat a poor peasant
without a copper.
ey mate, ow do you know so much about Jews? If I didnt ave a nose keen for
em, Id say you were a yid yourself.
Well, lets say I have lived with them, I have been in their homes. You know, we
abhor poverty, see it as a one way alley to death. But like a boat on the channel swells,
the Jew rises and falls with his opportunities, he is not depressed by penury and he is not
demoralized by success. If you want to see what your face really looks like, dont look in
the mirror, look at your children. And so look out there at our children, see them stunted
in growth, their eyes dark and anxious, their faces aged beyond their years. Their mothers
are out to work all day while the father drinks away his wages and his time. Sometimes

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the Mum drinks herself and gives the daily chores to the girls and boys, young children
who have gown up making dinner for their father and cleaning and dressing the baby,
cleaning up the house while the mother is out. Contrast this with the Jewish children,
who I can tell you are encouraged in every way at home, I have been there. Even the
poorest of the Jewish families seem to find some money to pay for a tutor. And so their
children progress in astonishing rapidity, seldom do they fail to reward their parents by a
substantial advance on their conditions.
And my dear friend, I continued, what you fear you most is how much this Jew
cares less about you. He is not moved one bit by our drunkenness and crime, he is
purposeful in his pursuit of physical health, intellectual acquisition and material
prosperity. And such is the cause of the Jews success.
You are a damn ekik lover true and blue, all the way through. Me? My only fear
is to find me limp when I should be me most solid. So what more are you trying to say?
Catch me before I find my bliss.
Used to be we were keen to find a new social order, a new pact with ourselves
based on principles we recognized from nature or plucked from reason. Not sure we care
about those pursuits or qualities anymore. Look around us, look at what we have
become, I think we should revisit. What can we know from the Jews? What can we
learn? Comparing the Jewish immigrant with the English laborer, we must admit the Jew
has inherited a superior intellect. What are we but broken skulls that we fill each day with
gin and rum. They are not opposed to hard labor, it is a rung on a ladder, and they will
climb onto it and then past it. We clamor for work, but we despise labor. The religious

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rites of the Jew are not a preparation for the next life, but to be best prepared for this one
now, for prolonging this life and ensuring the health of the family.
If we give them a place to live and food to eat, they can not only learn our
language but they can also take our faith. If they want to be better than us they got to
work at it, not be handed it thats all.
And so what you are really saying is that our collective antagonism towards the
Jew is best explained by the disappointments we have in ourselves. I believe all that I
have said. The children of Israel are the most law abiding inhabitants in our town. They
keep the peace, they pay their debts, they abide by their contracts. Practices that are far
superior to our own. They are undoubtedly superior to both the English and the Irish
with whom they dwell in this squalor. And it is by free and fair competition that the Jew
seeks success, while we seek to cover our own with protection, bribes and kickbacks. He
lives by an enlightened selfishness, seeking employment, ready to use both body and
mind, without pride, without preference, without interests outside the structure and
welfare of his family. Lets face it - we cannot win this game.
Nope, you are right. We are not fit to hold the candle. But to them I still say: My
mother, drunk or sober!
The magic of the opium was settling upon us both. Talk progressed but topics
were directed towards the ceilings, the stars we imagined that were overhead, the dreams
we hoped would be there to welcome us. Soon, two women came down upon us like
warm blankets and our nakedness did not embarrass either one of us a bit.
Later I found myself walking once again through the carnival of life, arm and
arm, Bucky and I, joined by all the worlds foulest and horrible elements: a man with one

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leg, a woman who kept showing me the meat of her flea bitten thighs, a cripple who
crawled across the floor like a pet animal: we all danced to the organ grinder and lifted
our pints and sang the songs every man sings before he dies! Pretty girls sat upon our
laps, kept our faces clean, made sure our pockets were not hanging out. We werent
slobs, we were rapscallions on an adventure! Aye aye! We ordered bangers and mash
and we raced to see who could bellydown the most the fastest! We smoked Havana
cigars rolled across our ladies velvet! We argued the whole night through, we raised dead
kin from their graves, we welcomed new friends, old friends and friends we never knew
we had to the revelry which seemed as if it would never, ever end.
I woke up in a barren hotel room, my pockets empty, my shoes gone.
Most pressing in my mind however, was not my current state of penury, but the
sudden realization that I had not received an answer to my third and last question from
the Oscillator. Something was wrong.

* * *

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Did anyone not know her?

Frequent in street brawls for a woman quick with her fists

An aristocrat among street women

As her coffin passed on the streetsragged caps were doffed and slatternly
looking women shed tears

Mary Jane Kelly, the last of the victims, was last heard singing on the streets
before her murder.

Good night old cock.

Braques Nude positions a fighting woman into her grave.

* * *

END OF BOOK 1

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