“Unbelievable,” Frank would say.
“I know. Isn’t it great?”
Before leaving for home at the end of the day, Frank often passed by another source of news, the little room filled with file cabinets and copy machines, informally called “The Department of Unfortunate Statistics.” Someone had started to tape on the beige walls of this room extra copies of pages that held interesting statistics or other bits of recent quantitative information. No one knew who had started the tradition, but now it was clearly a communal thing.
The oldest ones were headlines, things like:
WORLD BANK PRESIDENT SAYS FOUR BILLION LIVE ON LESS THAN TWO DOLLARS A DAY
or
AMERICA: FIVE PERCENT OF WORLD POPULATION, FIFTY PERCENT OF CORPORATE OWNERSHIP
Later pages were charts or tables of figures out of journal articles, or short articles of a quantitative nature out of the scientific literature.
When Frank went by on this day, Edgardo was in there at the coffee machine, as he so often was, looking at the latest. It was another headline:
352 RICHEST PEOPLE OWN AS MUCH AS THE POOREST TWO BILLION, SAYS CANADIAN FOOD PROJECT
“I don’t think this can be right,” Edgardo declared.
“How so?” Frank said.
“Because the poorest two billion have nothing, whereas the richest three hundred and fifty-two have a big percentage of the world’s total capital. I suspect it would take the poorest four billion at least to match the top three hundred and fifty.”
Anna came in as he was saying this, and wrinkled her nose as she went to the copying machine. She didn’t like this kind of conversation, Frank knew. It seemed to be a matter of distaste for belaboring the obvious. Or distrust in the data. Maybe she was the one who had taped up the brief quote: 72.8% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
Frank, wanting to bug her, said, “What do you think, Anna?”
“About what?”
Edgardo pointed to the headline and explained his objection.
Anna said, “I don’t know. Maybe if you add two billion small households up, it matches the richest three hundred.”
“Not this top three hundred. Have you seen the latest Forbes 500 reports?”
Anna shook her head impatiently, as if to say, Of course not, why would I waste my time? But Edgardo was an inveterate student of the stock market and the financial world in general. He tapped another taped-up page. “The average surplus value created by American workers is thirty-three dollars an hour.”
Anna said, “I wonder how they define surplus value.”
“Profit,” Frank said.
Edgardo shook his head. “You can cook the books and get rid of profit, but the surplus value, the value created beyond the pay for the labor, is still there.”
Anna said, “There was a page in here that said the average American worker puts in 1,950 hours a year. I thought that was questionable too, that’s forty hours a week for about forty-nine weeks.”
“Three weeks of vacation a year,” Frank pointed out. “Pretty normal.”
“Yeah, but that’s the average? What about all the part-time workers?”
“There must be an equivalent number of people who work overtime.”
“Can that be true? I thought overtime was a thing of the past.”
“You work overtime.”
“Yeah but I don’t get paid for it.”
The men laughed at her.
“They should have used the median,” she said. “The average is a skewed measure of central tendency. Anyway, that’s …” Anna could do calculations in her head. “Sixty-four thousand three hundred and fifty dollars a year, generated by the average worker in surplus value. If you can believe these figures.”
“What’s the average income?” Edgardo asked. “Thirty thousand?”
“Maybe less,” Frank said.
“We don’t have any idea,” Anna objected.
“Call it thirty, and what’s the average taxes paid?”
“About ten? Or is it less?”
Edgardo said, “Call it ten. So let’s see. You work every day of the year, except for three lousy weeks. You make around a hundred thousand dollars. Your boss takes two thirds, and gives you one third, and you give a third of that to the government. Your government uses what it takes to build all the roads and schools and police and pensions, and your boss takes his share and buys a mansion on an island somewhere. So naturally you complain about your bloated inefficient Big Brother of a government, and you always vote for the pro-owner party.” He grinned at Frank and Anna. “How stupid is that?”
Anna shook her head. “People don’t see it that way.”
“But here are the statistics!”
“People don’t usually put them together like that. Besides, you made half of them up.”
“They’re close enough for people to get the idea! But they are not taught to think! In fact they’re taught not to think. And they are stupid to begin with.”
Even Frank was not willing to go this far. “It’s a matter of what you can see,” he suggested. “You see your boss, you see your paycheck, it’s given to you. You have it. Then you’re forced to give some of it to the government. You never know about the surplus value you’ve created, because it was disappeared in the first place. Cooked in the books.”
“But the rich are all over the news! Everyone can see they have more than they have earned, because no one earns that much.”
“The only things people understand are sensory,” Frank insisted. “We’re hard-wired to understand life on the savannah. Someone gives you meat, they’re your friend. Someone takes your meat, they’re your enemy. Abstract concepts like surplus value, or statistics on the value of a year’s work, these just aren’t as real as what you see and touch. People are only good at what they can think out in terms of their senses. That’s just the way we evolved.”
“That’s what I’m saying,” Edgardo said cheerfully. “We are stupid!”
“I’ve got to get back to it,” Anna said, and left. It really wasn’t her kind of conversation.
Frank followed her out, and finally headed home. He drove his little fuel-cell Honda out Old Dominion Parkway, already jammed; over the Beltway, and then up to a condo complex called Swink’s New Mill, where he had rented a condominium for his year at NSF.
He parked in the complex’s cellar garage and took the elevator up to the fourteenth floor. His apartment looked out toward the Potomac—a long view and a nice apartment, rented out for the year by a young State Department guy who was doing a stint in Brasilia. It was furnished in a stripped-down style that suggested the man did not live there very often. But a nice kitchen, functional spaces, everything easy, and most of the time Frank was home he was asleep anyway, so he didn’t care what it was like.
He had picked up one of the free papers back at work, and now as he spooned down some cottage cheese he looked again at the Personals section, a regrettable habit he had had for years, fascinated as he was by the glimpse these pages gave of a subworld of radically efflorescing sexual diversity—a subculture that had understood the implications of the removal of biological constraints in the techno-urban landscape, and were therefore able and willing to create a kind of polymorphous panmixia. Were these people really out there, or was this merely the collective fantasy life of a bunch of lonely souls like himself? He had never contacted any of the people putting in the ads to try to find out. He suspected the worst, and would rather be lonely. Although the sections devoted to people looking for LTRs, meaning “long-term relationships,” went far beyond the sexual fantasies, and sometimes struck him with force. ISO LTR: “in search of long-term relationship.” The species had long ago evolved toward monogamous relationships, they were wired into the brain’s structure, every culture manifesting the same overwhelming tendency toward pair-bonding. Not a cultural imposition but a biological instinct. They might as well be storks in that regard.
And so he read the ads, but never re
plied. He was only here for a year; San Diego was his home. It made no sense to take any action on this particular front, no matter what he felt or read.
The ads themselves also tended to stop him.
Husband hunting, SWF, licensed nurse, seeks a hardworking, handsome SWM for LTR. Must be a dedicated Jehovah’s Witness
SBM, 5’ 5”, shy, quiet, a little bit serious, seeking Woman, age open. Not good-looking or wealthy but Nice Guy. Enjoy foreign movies, opera, theater, music, books, quiet evenings
These entries were not going to get a lot of responses. But they, like all the rest, were as clear as could be on the fundamental primate needs they were asking for. Frank could have written the urtext underneath them all, and one time he had, and had even sent it in to a paper, as a joke of course, for all those reading these confessions with the same analytical slant he had—it would make them laugh. Although of course if any woman reading it liked the joke well enough to call, well, that would have been a sign.
Male Homo sapiens desires company of female Homo sapiens for mutual talk and grooming behaviors, possibly mating and reproduction. Must be happy, run fast.
But no one had replied.
He went out onto the bas-relief balcony, into the sultry late afternoon. Another two months and he would be going home, back to resume his real life. He was looking forward to it. He wanted to float in the Pacific. He wanted to walk around beautiful UCSD in its cool warmth, eat lunch with old colleagues among the eucalyptus trees.
Thinking about that reminded him of the grant application from Yann Pierzinski. He went inside to his laptop and Googled him to try to learn more about what he had been up to. Then he reopened his application, and found the section on the part of the algorithm to be developed. Primitive recursion at the boundary limit … it was interesting.
After some more thought, he called up Derek Gaspar at Torrey Pines Generique.
“What’s up?” Derek said after the preliminaries.
“Well, I just got a grant proposal from one of your people, and I’m wondering if you can tell me anything about it.”
“From one of mine, what do you mean?”
“A Yann Pierzinski, do you know him?”
“No, never heard of him. He works here you say?”
“He was there on a temporary contract, working with Simpson. He’s a post-doc from Caltech.”
“Ah yeah, here we go. Mathematician, got a paper in Biomathematics on algorithms.”
“Yeah that comes up first on my Google too.”
“Well sure. I can’t be expected to know everyone who ever worked with us here, that’s hundreds of people, you know that.”
“Sure sure.”
“So what’s his proposal about? Are you going to give him a grant?”
“Not up to me, you know that. We’ll see what the panel says. But meanwhile, maybe you should check it out.”
“Oh you like it then.”
“I think it may be interesting, it’s hard to tell at this stage. Just don’t drop him.”
“Well, our records show him as already gone back up to Pasadena, to finish his work up there I presume. Like you said, his gig here was temporary.”
“Ah ha. Man, your research groups have been gutted.”
“Not gutted, Frank, we’re down to the bare bones in some areas, but we’ve kept what we need to. There have been some hard choices to make. Kenton wanted his note repaid, and the timing couldn’t have been worse. Coming after that stage two in India it’s been tough, really tough. That’s one of the reasons I’ll be happy when you’re back out here.”
“I don’t work for Torrey Pines anymore.”
“No I know, but maybe you could rejoin us when you move back here.”
“Maybe. If you get new financing.”
“I’m trying, believe me. That’s why I’d like to have you back on board.”
“We’ll see. Let’s talk about it when I’m out there. Meanwhile, don’t cut any more of your other research efforts. They might be what draws the new financing.”
“I hope so. I’m doing what I can, believe me. We’re trying to hold on til something comes through.”
“Yeah. Hang in there then. I’ll be out looking for a place to live in a couple of weeks, I’ll come see you then.”
“Good, make an appointment with Susan.”
Frank clicked off his phone, sat back in his chair thinking it over. Derek was like a lot of first-generation CEOs of biotech start-ups. He had come out of the biology department at UCSD, and his business acumen had been gained on the job. Some people managed to do this successfully, others didn’t, but all tended to fall behind on the actual science being done, and had to take on faith what was really possible in the labs. Certainly Derek could use some help in guiding policy at Torrey Pines Generique.
Frank went back to studying the grant proposal. There were elements of the algorithm missing, as was typical. That was what the grant was for, to pay for the work that would finish the project. And some people made a habit of describing crucial aspects of their work in general terms when at the prepub stage, a matter of being cautious. So he could not be sure about it, but he could see the potential for a very powerful method there. Earlier in the day he had thought he saw a way to plug one of the gaps that Pierzinski had left, and if that worked as he thought it might …
“Hmmmm,” he said to the empty room.
If the situation was still fluid when he went out to San Diego, he could perhaps set things up quite nicely. There were some potential problems, of course. NSF’s guidelines stated explicitly that although any copyrights, patents, or project income belonged to the grant holder, NSF always kept a public-right use for all grant-subsidized work. That would keep any big gains from being made by an individual or company on a project like this, if it was awarded a grant. Purely private control could only be maintained if there had not been any public money granted.
Also, the P.I. on the proposal was Pierzinski’s advisor at Caltech, battening off the work of his students in the usual way. Of course it was an exchange—the advisor gave the student credibility, a sort of license to apply for a grant, by contributing his name and prestige to the project. The student provided the work, sometimes all of it, sometimes just a portion of it. In this case, it looked to Frank like all of it.
Anyway, the grant proposal came from Caltech. Caltech and the P.I. would hold the rights to anything the project made, along with NSF itself, even if Pierzinski moved afterward. So, if for instance an effort was going to be made to bring Pierzinski to Torrey Pines Generique, it would be best if this particular proposal were to fail. And if the algorithm worked and became patentable, then again, keeping control of what it made would only be possible if the proposal were to fail.
That line of thought made him feel jumpy. In fact he was on his feet, pacing out to the minibalcony and back in again. Then he remembered he had been planning to go out to Great Falls anyway. He quickly finished his cottage cheese, pulled his climbing kit out of the closet, changed clothes, and went back down to his car.
The Great Falls of the Potomac was a complicated thing, a long tumble of whitewater falling down past a few islands. The complexity of the falls was its main visual appeal, as it was no very great thing in terms of total height, or even volume of water. Its roar was the biggest thing about it.
The spray it threw up seemed to consolidate and knock down the humidity, so that paradoxically it was less humid here than elsewhere, although wet and mossy underfoot. Frank walked downstream along the edge of the gorge. Below the falls the river re-collected itself and ran through a defile called Mather Gorge, a ravine with a south wall so steep that climbers were drawn to it. One section called Carter Rock was Frank’s favorite. It was a simple matter to tie a rope to a top belay, usually a stout tree trunk near the cliff’s edge, and then rappel down the rope to the bottom and either free-climb up, or clip onto the rope with an ascender and go through the hassles of self-belay.
One could climb in team
s too, of course, and many did, but there were about as many singletons like Frank here as there were duets. Some even free-soloed the wall, dispensing with all protection. Frank liked to play it just a little safer than that, but he had climbed here so many times now that sometimes he rappelled down and free-climbed next to his rope, pretending to himself that he could grab it if he fell. The few routes available were all chalked and greasy from repeated use. He decided this time to clip onto the rope with the ascender.
The river and its gorge created a band of open sky that was unusually big for the metropolitan area. This as much as anything else gave Frank the feeling that he was in a good place: on a wall route, near water, and open to the sky. Out of the claustrophobia of the great hardwood forest, one of the things about the East Coast that Frank hated the most. There were times he would have given a finger for the sight of open land.
Now, as he rappelled down to the small tumble of big boulders at the foot of the cliff, chalked his hands, and began to climb the fine-grained old schist of the route, he cheered up. He focused on his immediate surroundings to a degree unimaginable when he was not climbing. It was like the math work, only then he wasn’t anywhere at all. Here, he was right on these very particular rocks.
This route he had climbed before many times. About a 5.8 or 5.9 at its crux, much easier elsewhere. Hard to find really hard pitches here, but that didn’t matter. Even climbing up out of a ravine, rather than up onto a peak, didn’t matter. The constant roar, the spray, those didn’t matter. Only the climbing itself mattered.
His legs did most of the work. Find the footholds, fit his rock-climbing shoes into cracks or onto knobs, then look for handholds; and up, and up again, using his hands only for balance, and a kind of tactile reassurance that he was seeing what he was seeing, that the footholds he was expecting to use would be enough. Climbing was the bliss of perfect attention, a kind of devotion, or prayer. Or simply a retreat into the supreme competencies of the primate cerebellum. A lot was conserved.