Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,44
file them, code them, write them. The problem was not even so much the dying as the overlap in the deaths. The ones who had the same names—the Smiths and the Rodriguezes and the Sullivans and the Johnsons. Fathers with the same names as their sons. The dead uncles with the exact initials as the dead nephews. The ones who went AWOL. The split missions. The misreported. The mistakes. The secret squadrons, the flotillas, the task forces, the reconnaissance crews. The ones who got married in little rural villages. The ones who stayed deep in the jungle. Who could account for them? But he fit them into his program as best he could. Created a space for them so that they became a sort of alive. He put his head down, worked it, asked no questions. It was, he said, the patriotic thing to do. What he liked most was the moment of creation, when he solved what nobody else could solve, when the solution was clean and elegant.
It was easy enough to write a program that would collate the dead, he said, but what he really wanted was to write a program that could make sense of the dying. That was the deep future. One day the computers would bring all the great minds together. Thirty, forty, a hundred years from now. If we don’t blow one another asunder first.
We’re at the cusp of human knowledge here, Mama, he said. He wrote about the dream of widely separated facilities sharing special resources. Of messages that were able to go back and forth. Of remote systems that could be manipulated through the telephone lines. Of computers that were capable of repairing their own malfunctions. Of protocols and bulk erasers and teletype printouts and memory and RAM and maxing out the Honeywell and fooling around on the prototype Alto that had been sent across. He described circuit boards like some people described icicles. He said that the Eskimos had sixty-four words for snow but that didn’t surprise him; he thought they should have more—why not? It was about the deepest sort of beauty, the product of the human mind being stamped onto a piece of silicon that you might one day cart around in your briefcase. A poem in a rock. A theorem in a slice of stone.
The programmers were the artisans of the future. Human knowledge is power, Mama. The only limits are in our minds. He said there was nothing that a computer couldn’t do, even the most complicated problems, find the value of pi, the root of all language, the most distant star. It was crazy how small the world truly was. It was a matter of opening up to it. What you want is your machine to speak back to you, Mama. It almost has to be human. You have to think of it that way. It’s like a Walt Whitman poem: you can put in it everything you want.
She sat by the fridge and read his letters and smoothed his hair and told him it was time to go to sleep, that he should eat something, he should change his clothes, that he really needed to look after himself. She wanted to make sure he wasn’t fading away. Once, during a blackout, she sat against the kitchen cabinets and wept: she couldn’t get through to him. She stuck a lead pencil into the wall socket and waited. When the electricity came on the pencil jumped in her fingers. She was aware of how it might look—a woman at a fridge, opening and closing the door—but it was a solace, and not something Solomon would suspect. She could pretend that she was cooking, or getting a glass of milk, or waiting for meat to thaw.
Solomon didn’t talk about the war. Silence was his way out. He chatted instead about his court cases, the insane litany of the city, the murders, the rapes, the cons, the hustles, the stabbings, the robberies. But not the war. Only the protesters came in his range—he thought them weak, guileless, cowardly. Gave them the stiffest sentences he could. Six months for pouring blood on the draft board files. Eight months for smashing the windows of the Times Square recruiting office. She wanted to march and protest, to meet all the hippies and yippies and skippies in Union Square, Tompkins Square Park, to carry a banner for the Catonsville Nine. But she just couldn’t bring herself to do it. We must support our