The Candy House(28)

That was when Alison made the list of my assets.



* * *



Later on the same day that began with our unscheduled Unit Meeting with Avery, I see M eating lunch by herself in the Rock Garden. Normally, she eats her lunch with Marc—in fact, eating lunch together is how their relationship began—so M’s presence alone in the Rock Garden is a rare opportunity for me.

I stare at M through the window in a state of extreme anxiety about how to proceed. If I approach her, there is a 100 percent likelihood that I’ll have to initiate conversation, and of course a significant possibility that this conversation will not be spontaneous or interesting—especially since nervousness, a certainty for me in M’s presence, will diminish by at least 50 percent my ability to speak naturally. But my dad has always said, “Doing anything really interesting requires a leap,” meaning that boldness, by definition, flouts the math that precedes it. And because Dad is a mathematically inclined typical and a “political junkie” deeply involved in the metrics of our cousin Miles Hollander’s bid for state senator, I take his analysis seriously.

The small stones I cross toward M are roughly 35 percent sharp-edged gray shale striated with white and another 25 percent rounded clayish stones. The remaining 40 percent are my favorite: dense, smooth black stones that soak up the sun’s heat. The large furniture-like rocks appear to have solidified from a liquid state just moments before and are said to be meteorites. M is leaning against the largest one, looking up at a sky that is roughly one third fast-moving clouds and two thirds desert blue.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hi,” M says.

Having employed retroactive math on a multitude of my past interactions, I’ve arrived at a predictive formula that has proved infallible so far: If a two-person conversation remains awkward for eight lines of speech—four lines each, not counting salutations—it has an 80 percent chance of remaining awkward, whereas if a conversation becomes natural within those first eight lines of speech, it is likely to remain so, and—surprisingly—to leave an impression of naturalness despite up to ten additional awkward lines! The trouble with this predictive math is that conversation becomes harder to generate when you’re feeling pressured and nervous, and the threat of an irrevocably awkward conversation with a girl you’re in love with is stressful, especially since escaping the conversation will require that you walk away across fifty feet of stones, thereby granting her a prolonged opportunity (while watching your receding back) to reflect on how dumb it is that you crossed the entire Rock Garden to talk to her when you had nothing to say, how you obviously have a crush on her, how this is a shame because while she has enjoyed sharing a partition with you, she doesn’t feel that way about you; how she might have, 6.28 months ago when she rose up over the partition and said “Peekaboo” and you both laughed so unbelievably hard, but after that you acted weird and distant and then Marc came along and she loves him now, and even if, say, 13 percent of her thoughts, as she watches your receding back, involve the fact that you’re in excellent physical shape, in the winner-take-all system that is operative in the choice of a monogamous romantic partner, that 13 percent will wind up being statistically irrelevant.

So. Pressure.

And if more than eight lines of awkward dialogue threaten irrevocable awkwardness, silences like the one now elapsing between M and me are an even greater peril. And I am a guy who knows how to measure silences. But whereas in music, a prolonged pause adds power and vividness to the refrain that follows it, pauses in conversation have the opposite effect, of debasing whatever comes next to the point that a perfectly witty riposte will be reduced to the verbal equivalent of a shrunken head, if too long a pause precedes it.

Leading to the question: How long has it been since M and I exchanged our “hi”s?

3.36 seconds.

What! How can so many thoughts and observations possibly have elapsed in so brief a period? An impressionist will answer along the lines of “The distortions inherent in our perception of time,” but to us counters, time is a bore—and not just because too much has been said and written about it. Time is irrelevant to math. Note that I did not say math is irrelevant to time; we hurl math at time in the vain hope of understanding it. The fact that so many thoughts could have gone through my head in 3.36 seconds is testament to the infinitude of an individual consciousness. There is no end to it, no way to measure it. Consciousness is like the cosmos multiplied by the number of people alive in the world (assuming that consciousness dies when we do, and it may not) because each of our minds is a cosmos of its own: unknowable, even to ourselves. Hence the instant appeal of Mandala’s Own Your Unconscious. Who could resist the chance to revisit our memories, the majority of which we’d forgotten so completely that they seemed to belong to someone else? And having done that, who could resist gaining access to the Collective Consciousness for the small price of making our own anonymously searchable? We all went for it on our twenty-first birthday, Mandala’s age of consent, just as prior tech generations went for music sharing and DNA analysis, never fully reckoning, in our excitement over our revelatory new freedom, with what we surrendered by sharing the entirety of our perceptions to the Internet—and thereby to counters, like me. Strict rules govern the use of gray grabs by data gatherers, but there are occasions when I’m obliged, in my professional capacity, to search the psyches of strangers. It’s an eerie sensation—like walking through an unfamiliar home and being surrounded by objects that radiate significance I can’t decipher. I grab what I need and leave as quickly as I can.