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Light rain was falling outside. I didn’t have an umbrella. Dread gripped my stomach. I had betrayed Ivan by talking about him—by causing a stranger to call him “this computer fellow” and to compare him with the Unabomber. Thanks to me, there now existed in the world some neural representation of “this computer fellow.” I had the irrational fear that Ivan would find out about it, or that he somehow already knew.
I tried to comfort myself with the reflection that Ivan had, after all, also talked about me, and that whatever his friend Imre thought about me was probably no less stupid than whatever the psychologist thought about Ivan. This thought did not raise my spirits.
Dear Ivan,
Your message wasn’t easy for me to understand. I guess I’m too used to thinking of words as a means to an end. Words create a mood, but they aren’t the mood itself. I definitely agree that some moods can’t be conveyed by clear and logical language, or by essays. Essays can be such a pain! Basically, the reader isn’t on your side, so you can’t leave out any of the logical steps. And sometimes when a connection is delicate, the steps take too long to spell out—it just isn’t possible, by the time you get to the end of the steps, the mood is lost.
In that sense, it’s better to write a letter to a friend. You can get away with more. You can make bigger jumps. Of course, there’s always a chance that she (he?) can’t follow you. I think about that all the time. When is a mood no longer worth the confusion? What’s the right proportion?
I never thought to differentiate between you and the person who writes your letters. But I think I see your point. I send you an email: how do you know who wrote it? It could be anyone. There’s no way for me to convince you. I say, “It’s me!”; you say: “Who’s ‘me’?”
Wouldn’t it be amazing if it turned out that we both had ghostwriters? Just imagine them taking a long walk together, walking and walking, and talking only if something came up . . .
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Ivan appeared at redwood.stanford.edu, then kepler.berkeley.edu.
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Svetlana and I went jogging. She kept saying how free she felt in shorts—she had Naired her legs for the first time. She talked about a poem she had written, in which she dropped her laptop in the rain and swallowed the universe. She was worried that “swallowing the universe” sounded pretentious, because the sensation she was trying to describe was really similar to the sensation of swallowing an entire hard-boiled egg. Should she just say she had swallowed a whole egg, and leave the universe out of it? But the egg felt like the whole universe. “It’s so hard to be sincere without sounding pretentious,” she said. “I mean, what are you supposed to do if you really happen to feel like you’ve swallowed the universe? Not say so?”
“I’ve been wondering that, too,” I said. In the end, I thought she should just say she felt like she had swallowed the universe, unless it was really exactly the same feeling as having swallowed a hard-boiled egg, because in that case it was probably better to err on the side of caution.
“I guess,” she said.
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Ivan sent an email. It was a sort of prose poem about stars and hell. It was really about those things. Sometimes I made jokes, to myself, about stars and hell. There was nobody else to tell them to.
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The adult education program assigned me a new student. The form read only “Dinah, algebra, Thursday 7 p.m.”
Dinah was about my mother’s age and wore, on the bosom of her flower-printed dress, a large button displaying a slightly blurry snapshot of a black boy getting up from a desk, looking over his shoulder. Dinah herself kept sitting down and standing up again, taking things out of a big red tote bag. She told me that the boy in the photo was her son, Albert, who had passed away in January at age eighteen. I, too, was eighteen. How could she not be wondering, as I myself was now, why I was alive and sitting in a room with her, while her son no longer existed?
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“Thank you, honey,” she said. “These things happen for a reason. But I don’t know the reason. That’s why I’m back in school.”
“It’s wonderful that you’re doing that,” I said, because I still believed in school.
“It sure is, honey. After all, what do I have to do all day? So now I’m going to college! The thing is, I just don’t know about this algebra.” She sighed. “I go to the class. I don’t understand. So, I don’t go to the class. I still don’t understand. Inside or outside of that class, I don’t understand a word that man says. Ascending other, descending other—it just doesn’t mean anything to me.”
By this time she had produced from her tote bag and set on the table five bags of pink yarn, three loose cigarettes, a gold lighter, a spiral notebook, an algebra text, two broken pencils, and a picture frame decorated with a yellow ribbon and a sprig of some leafy plant. The picture frame contained a larger print of the same photograph of her son.
Having arranged these items in a row, Dinah adjusted her chair and opened her notebook. “Okay,” she said. “Now, the first thing I want you to explain to me is the Other.”
“The Other,” I repeated, to buy time. I was pretty sure that the Other was a French construct having something to do with either sex or colonialism.
“That’s right. The Descending Other.”
“Hmm,” I said. “Could it be you’re thinking of descending order?”
Dinah stared at me, then slapped the table and shook her head. “That’s it, that’s exactly it! Do you see what I’m telling you? I don’t understand a thing that man says! I don’t even understand the words he says. So first off what I want you to explain to me is this descending other. I mean order. Ha! Ha! I said ‘other’ again! Will you listen to me?” She picked up a cigarette and started twirling it between her fingers.
“Descending order is just when you start with the biggest number and go down to the smallest number,” I said. “In order. Like, that’s the kind of order they’re in. So let’s say you have some numbers, like one, nine, and three. And you want to put them in descending order. That would be, nine, three, one.”
“Okay okay, wait a second. How do you get the three and the one from the nine?”
“Well, I just sort of made them up. As an example of some numbers.”
She looked at me for a second. “You know what, honey?” she said. “You’re going to have to excuse me. I think I need a cigarette. No, you don’t get up. You stay here. I’ll be back in five minutes.”
“Excuse me?”
“Now, don’t you worry about me. Because I’m here. I’m not going anywhere, nooooo, sir, I’m here.” She picked up her lighter.
“Okay, but where are you going?”
“I just—I’m here, honey, that’s all that counts,” she said, and went out the door.
I looked at the three bags of pink yarn. Then I got up and looked out the window. Some kind of slush was falling out of the sky and piling up on the ground. It reminded me of stars and hell.