Sommelier School

by Daniel Bryant

This was one of those times: David could see the catastrophe coming; he knew his attempts to stop it were going to cause it; and he knew he could do nothing to stop his attempts to stop it.

This time he was married. He and his wife, Maya, had made reservations for a weekend away: Friday to Sunday, at Sommelier School, which, the advertisement had said, “would teach them things about themselves they always knew were there, but never quite could name.”

“It’s not about wine,” he had said to Maya, not three weeks prior, when they made the reservation. “It’s about what’s going on within us… It’s about truly knowing ourselves… It’s what we’ve always wanted!”

“What’s going on with us?”

“Within us,” he corrected. “Don’t you think it will be great?”

“Sure,” she said, in a way that made him want to ask, Do you mean it?

The night before they were supposed to leave, she told him something had come up at work. This was Thursday. They were eating dinner together with the silence and deliberateness of couples who have recently lost the ability to be silent with one another without worrying about the silence.

Their daughter, Isabel, was sleeping upstairs. The baby monitor stood upright on the table between them. Its antenna pierced the air. David felt it there, so present in his awareness, like a quarter stood on end. Sometimes he fiddled longingly with the volume knob as though he could conjure Isabel’s crying, or sometimes her laughter, her beautiful laughter—to make his daughter cheer happily through the crackling static and end the awful quiet.

Something about his wife told him she wanted to say something. Maybe it was the deliberateness of her knife and fork.

“I’m excited for tomorrow,” he said, speaking hopefully to her slow cutting.

“I know we said we’d go for sure,” she said quickly, “but do you think maybe I could come up a few hours later? I have to be at the investors’ event tomorrow. It just came up,” This was how she did things—she sounded like she was asking, but the power was all hers.

“You’ll miss the big intro and the initial lessons,” he said. “The scheduler kept stressing how important it is to be there for the whole thing. How you… what was it they said?—how you start with simple premonitions then build and build toward something like a great concert within you, something which has always been there, or has been building for so long, and yet is entirely—”

“It’s with our biggest client—we’re near a breakthrough. A sales breakthrough. I really should be there. Just a few hours.”

A sales breakthrough? he thought. “They never make you go,” he said.

“They’re not making me go. But I really should.”

“But you hate those things!”

“They’re not that bad.”

She had never said anything like this. She had always hated those things. Or at least, she had always said so.

She was a bioengineer. A Ph.D. One of the staff scientists—not at the top, but with the potential to be—at a company that labeled itself a boutique bioengineering firm. “What the hell is a boutique bioengineering firm?” he had asked. “It’s a bioengineering firm that is not yet a behemoth bioengineering firm,” she had joked to him. “It’s just marketing.” That was a year ago, back when she was still herself, the woman he’d met in grad school. She’d always agreed that the sales-and-money side of science was for other people. Or rather, she’d always agreed that science proper does not have a sales-and-money side. But now she was coming late to their weekend away at Sommelier School, saying of her boutique sales parties, “They’re not that bad.”

“This just came up today?”

“This week.”

Don’t question her, he said to himself, it will just make you look jealous. And for the love of God, don’t ask her about Goodworth.

Goodworth. Was something going on there? Don’t think it. He was one of the senior sales managers at her firm, perhaps the person who’d decided they should use the word “boutique”—probably because he’d seen it somewhere and liked the way it made him feel. David doubted whether the man had ever used a dictionary.

Goodworth was precisely the man we expect him to be. That he is precisely the man we expect him to be is part of who we expect him to be. He had a military aspect, but he had never been in the military. An abiding trust in firm handshakes. He was a money man. An investor. Buttoned-down blue shirts as stiff and starched as his conception of the universe. Cuff links on any Tuesday. Brusque masculinity. Not just the will to mock profundity—to deride science and wonder—but the ability to mock the profound in a way that made you almost, almost want to agree with him, to want his approval. How silly you were to consider the great questions when there was, all around you, all this easily circumscribable money and power to be mined right out of the pliant and willing markets.

He was, in short, simplicity—the very person with whom you would have an affair if your husband was someone who could drive you away with the worry he’d always had, but had never had about you until… when had it started? But he was also the type of man who leaves you, in the end, with the notion that maybe well-pressed shirts aren’t the end all—that the great big beautiful Universe can’t be smashed into a few simple notions. Man and woman and money and sex? There’s more, you say. But too late. Then you go back to your David.

Don’t ask her about Goodworth, David repeated to himself. So instead he asked, “Who’s the lead on the account?”

“Goodworth.”

David leaned back in his chair, deliberately silent for three strained beats, then he said, trying to sound cool. “Too much portfolio and not enough universe.” This was Maya’s own phrase, back from when she was still herself.

“Oh come on, he’s not that bad.”

Don’t protest, he said to himself. To protest would be to admit he’s a threat. He is not a threat. You are cool. You are calm. You are the husband.

“You’ll come up after the event?” he asked.

“Of course I will,” she said. I’m your wife, she seemed to add. “I won’t even need to come home. We won’t need to cancel the sitter.”

Her eyes seemed to plead with him. Don’t keep on like this, she seemed to say. We are obviously changing, but if you keep acting so afraid of how we’re changing, you’re going to make us change for good. I don’t want this weekend to go how it’s definitely going to go, but that’s not up to me. It’s up to you.

He knew it was up to him. He knew too that he could do nothing to stop it.

~

“Welcome,” the master of ceremonies said, opening his arms wide, “to Sommelier School.” He smiled the toothy smile of someone who runs a sommelier school. “I,”—great and studied pauses dramatically punctuated his speech—“am Alfred,”—sometimes to the point where you forgot what he was saying, “and I will be your guide.”

His open arms then stretched out forward like he was receiving a giant, invisible beach ball. Come into my embrace, he seemed to say, trust me with your brains. “We are thrilled to have you here.”

David was sitting with about a hundred others. A big ballroom in a big resort up high in the hay-colored hills above Pasadena Tech. Alfred stood alone before them. A podium to his left. An empty chair to his right. The chair was obviously an unordinary chair. David felt the uplifting excitement of the moment. He felt the downward pull that tugged his stomach from his wife’s empty seat beside him.

“You know what you’ve gotten yourselves into,” Alfred said, then paused for long enough to make them realize that, of course, they did not know what they’d gotten themselves into. “But do you really know?”

David knew, but he didn’t really know. As he sat with the others in the big ballroom, in one of the so-called plenary sessions, he knew this wasn’t where the learning would really happen. He knew the learning would really happen in one of those small rooms off the main hallway—the individual teaching rooms.

Just after his arrival he’d gotten a preview of what was waiting for him; he’d seen inside one of those rooms. He had checked in, a bit embarrassed. No, no, my wife will arrive later. Yes, I know the program builds on itself and really should only be considered in entire. Then he started down the hallway toward the ballroom. But something to his right stopped him.

Through a doorway, he saw a man sitting in a chair. An obviously unordinary chair. The man’s face was vacant, bored even, like he was waiting for a train. But then the man’s eyes suddenly crossed, and he screamed in a violent rage, “I’m going to kill him!” The rage was over at once. The man’s eyes became the flutter of fast-moving clouds, then David saw on his face what he could only then describe as a great lamentation, whatever it is that makes one write a cello concerto after a global war. Then again the man’s face changed abruptly, this time with the awareness of someone who has just woken up. The man said, wiping tears from his eyes, “That was so… I’ve never… it was so… pure, and yet... so complex.”

A toothy-smiled man blocked David’s view—this was Alfred, but not yet known by name.

“Ah, you must be from the incoming group,” pre-Alfred said. “The weekenders! My favorite group! Right this way! You’re in for a special treat.” All things were special treats for this man. His open, deferential hand said, Come this way. I’m serving you, but that doesn’t mean you’re smarter than I am. I am the end-all, sommelier-wise.

David peered once more into the room.

“Don’t worry,” Alfred reassured him, gesturing again toward the ballroom. “You’ll feel what he felt soon enough. But we must start simpler, we must build!”

Now David was in the plenary session, listening to Alfred’s shtick. His alfredness seemed multiplied by the number of people in the room.

“A demonstration, then...” said Alfred, who had obviously over-studied elocution. “A volunteer?”

Another man’s hand shot up, besting David’s.

“Excellent,” said Alfred. “If you please,” he gestured to the chair beside him. The crowd looked on.

“You’ve already signed all the forms, of course, so you know what I can do to you?” said Alfred to the man, now seated.

The man nodded then smiled with the thumbs-up of a courageous astronaut. Go for launch.

“Oh dear me,” said Alfred to the thumb, then walked over to the podium. “I hate to do this but...” He tapped the podium, and the man began screaming a wide-eyed and open-mouthed scream. He screamed with all the abandon of a cartoon character whose tongue sticks way out and undulates frantically, kinking in all directions. Alfred tapped the podium again, and the man inhaled with the almost-smiling, flushed and still wide-eyed exhilaration of one just landed from a sky-dive.

“Let’s give him a hand!” smiled Alfred, and the room applauded for the relieved, excited man. David wished Maya were there with him; this was what they had talked about so many nights in grad school.

“Most people would call what he just experienced fear,” Alfred said. They wouldn’t be wrong, but neither would they be precise. So I guess they would be wrong!” He smiled. “They might not mean the same thing someone else means when they say fear. Am I right?” He waited for the confirmation that never came. “What our brave new sommelier student just experienced… Those of us who know, we call it simply 6412, and we can differentiate it from 6413.” Then turning to the man, Alfred said, “What do you say, ready for another?”

Another brave-astronaut thumbs-up.

“I admire your courage!” said Alfred, then looking at the podium he said, “or rather, I admire your 4916!” Then he stopped and frowned just a little. “Of course,” he said, “the will to numerically circumscribe, readout, and transfer does not exactly—” But he paused abruptly, leaving the impression that his start-then-stop was pre-planned. “No no,” he said, teasing. “We’ll wait till tomorrow to really explore ourselves, to experience all that the future can bring. But I wonder, courageous volunteer, I wonder, could I try a nasty one, just to show you, and all our friends here, the faintest glimmer of our true range?”

A hesitant thumbs-up. A less courageous astronaut this time.

“I promise I’ll give you a preview of expansive-love afterward,” he said, “what some people might call bonhomie and others a capacious, trusting goodwill… how you would feel if everyone in the world were your child and you had a deep sense of self created by joyful relation to them. But for now?” He tapped the podium.

The man’s lip curled into a virulent disdain aimed directly at Alfred.

“Uh oh!” said Alfred, looking at his screen. “He’s not used to his one! He must be a rather jolly and forgiving fellow by nature. This one… Some of us simply call it 337. The best we can convey it, word-wise, is as jealousy-envy-disdain-disrespect-tinge-of-loathing-unwilled-self-effacement. Did you ever meet someone you really didn’t like, but for some reason you couldn’t help but—Uh oh!” The jealously envious, self-effacing man tried to rise from his chair. “Getting too much!” Alfred tapped the podium again, and the man breathed in, then slumped his head forward. Alfred said, “You’ll remember 337, I can tell!”

The man wiped his forehead as Alfred turned to the crowd and said, eliciting a great applause, “The learning has already begun!”

Alfred then left the podium, leaving the man still slightly slumped over. He readied his arms for another giant beach ball. He seemed about to speak, but with a sudden flourish of his index finger he said, “Ah yes! I owe this man something special!” He hopped back to the podium, and, flourishing the index finger once again, he brought it down upon the controls as he said, “Capacious and trusting goodwill for all humanity!”

The man relaxed, leaned back, almost slid down in his chair with the purest inhale-exhale, sleepy-wondrous come-what-may on his face. Alfred finished his shtick:

“We are beyond casual words,” he said. “Collisions and confusions of words… as a species… as a people… or at least, we can be.

“A sommelier is a wine waiter, one who must know not just red wine and white, rosé perhaps, and sparkling—happiness, sadness, loneliness, love—but hints of tobacco, dark cherry, and cloves, the finish so smooth, unforgettably rich. 3-3-7 is not 3-3-6. Only the former a prickling tickle, the palette remembering unwilled self-effacement, hinting, and staining, stinging like tannins, remnant as an afterthought.”

He closed his eyes then, as if smelling the bouquet of his words.

“We scientists, we artists, we are but sommelier’s of ourselves. Or at least, we can be. And at long last, we have our hoped-for common ground… in biophysical science, it’s nexus in the brain.

“We are here,” he paused, “to learn about ourselves… the things we always knew were there, but never quite could name.

“Welcome,” he said, “to Sommelier School.”

~

“You’ve gotta get up here,” David said in the hallway, on the phone with Maya.

“Is it what you wanted?”

“It’s what we wanted!”

“And what was that?”

“We’re coming to know ourselves and one another better every second!”

“That sounds—wait hang on—”

Another man’s voice spoke from his wife’s end of the phone. “Come on, come on,” said the masculine voice, “you’re a hit with the investors.”

“Who was that?” he asked, even though he knew who it was.

An uncertain pause. “Goodworth.”

He hated that voice, even though he’d only met the man twice. The second time, he’d told Goodworth about their plans for Sommelier School. They were at a holiday party for her company. The decorations, the drinks, the conversation all suggested they were designed by the same person who’d chosen the word boutique. Somehow David had let himself get separated from Maya. Somehow he’d let himself become attached to a group of three or four men, each of whom was an goodworth in his own right. Each was unique, for indeed, each wore a slightly different-colored blue shirt.

David picked up something one of them had said about wine, and suddenly he was telling them about Sommelier School, about truly understanding the nature of ourselves.

“Maya’s into this too?” Goodworth asked with a condescending irony, almost a snicker that meant: Listen, I know Maya better than you do, and I gotta say, this doesn’t sound like her thing.

The thing to say, David later realized, was this: What could you possibly understand about Maya that I don’t! Your absence of creativity and curiosity and complexity will leave you forgotten. Damn you and your handshakes. Damn you and your dismissiveness of all that you can’t be—of all that humans can. Damn you and your cool-kid power. I will raise up an army of bio-engineered killer robots to extirpate from this earth the House of Goodworth and all successive Houses of Goodworth, then I will extirpate all alien Houses of Goodworth from soon-to-be-colonized extra-solar planets. But he did not say this. Why? The sleight-of-hand magic that all cool kids employ as their only strength was working on him even then. In the moment, one never knows how they do it. But just then, David wanted Goodworth and all the other goodworths to like him, just a little. Or at least, he witnessed himself acting as though this were true. Goodworth was a powerful man because he was a powerful man. This is how power works. David was even slightly embarrassed for his wonder, for the wild excitement about Sommelier School that had, as he described it to the three or four goodworths, pitched his voice into sounds you would never hear in a boardroom. He was justifying himself, explaining the School, the real magic of it all: how—perhaps least among the many wonders—we can know and replicate and name our complex experiences.

“I only have two experiences I need names for...” one of the goodworths said. Then another added, as if they were but two voices for the same brain, “...havin’ sex, and about to be havin’ sex!”

All three or four goodworths laughed.

David didn’t remember all this explicitly—how it looked, how it sounded—but just then, as he stood alone in the hallway speaking to his wife on the phone, he remembered the feeling, so complex, but specific enough to be replicated.

“What is it?” Maya asked from the other end of the line.

“337, I think.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” he said, “I—”

But Goodworth spoke from somewhere in that unseen room with his wife. “Come on,” the intruder said.

“I should get going,” his wife said. “The investors are calling for me.”

“Just so long as he doesn’t ex-vest you.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” he said. “When do you think you’ll get here?”

“Definitely no later than ten.”

“Okay.” He knew what would happen at ten. She wouldn’t arrive. She would call, probably from the party. This was what she’d begun to do. When had it started? She would tell him she would meet him somewhere, for dinner, say, or at home, she’d be definitive when she needn’t have been—“definitely no later than ten,” she’d say—then right at the appointed time, she would call from wherever she still was. She could have called at the appointed time minus however many minutes it would have taken to get to the appointed place. No use arguing. All the arguing in the world can’t change whatever it is inside someone that makes them not want to see you. No. It can change whatever it is. But only to make it worse.

“I really should get going,” she said. “The investors—”

“Sure, sure,” he said. “See you at ten.”

Until that moment he’d never thought of her as someone who cared whether investors were calling for her or not. Maybe she was changing, or maybe he had never noticed this aspect of her. Maybe Goodworth did see something he didn’t.

~

David was waiting in one of the individual teaching rooms. He felt like he was at the doctor, waiting for the knock, the entry, of someone who professed to know. His teacher would be there any minute.

He would feel what the screaming volunteer had felt. He would feel what the tearful man had felt, the flutter of fast-moving clouds on his face. He would have his own chance to learn. To name. To understand. He wished Maya were there with him. He thought of her where she was, sitting at a table, perhaps, glowing from the radiant light of something he never thought could make her glow: the attention of the money men.

He and Maya had been Ph.D. students at Pasadena Tech when they’d met, six years ago. She’d graduated, gone on to a post-doctoral fellowship, then left for “industry”—her boutique firm.

In those first years together, she was still herself. She’d always laughed at the idea of going into industry. When she left for industry, she told him, maybe she told herself, it was because of their daughter. “I must really love Isabel,” she joked, “because at my new job, I’m going to have to actually interact with people!”

Now she was coming late to their weekend together, to their weekend of brain science, so she could stay late at a sales event. People don’t change, they just become more so what they were the whole time. Maybe he could have seen it. Maybe it had been hiding in her all along, even in their early days.

In their early days, she would come over after classes in the late afternoon, before the sun even tried to set. Once she was in, behind the door, she would twist the deadbolt what felt like twenty exhilarating times, then she would turn to him, and with her back and both arms pressed against the door, she would say, “in for the night,” in a way that made him think of great feasts and wild bacchanals and unnameable tenderness all concerting together under what seemed to be the starry sky of their future—two scientists re-inventing the nature of themselves, the nature of the self, through bioengineering. They would lift the mattress off his bed and push it along the floor into the living room to flop it down in front of the fireplace.

Under the blanket, their only covering, her head on his shoulder, his hand in her hair, they would stare up at the ceiling which waved quickly with the fast orange tide of the firelight and shimmered with all the great possibility of young people becoming real people while they were still young—and becoming so by scientific truth. They would whisper of bioengineering as if to speak it too loud would cede it to another, so powerful it was. They could see right through the ceiling to the stars. “Bioengineering will change everything,” he would say, almost breathless, not bothering to wonder whether his exhilaration came from the promise of science or the extraordinary individual with her leg kinked over him.

“Some things will never change,” she would say, as she rolled onto him in a way that made him think not at all of his research but engendered in him the wonder of truth all the same.

When had they changed? He was still the same as he had been in their earlier days. He could do anything in those days. He could still do anything. He had studied languages as an undergraduate, then he had entered a Ph.D. program in neural engineering. Those early days, those early nights, his Spanish and French would overlap his English as he programmed brain-computer interfaces, and he would see with wild excitement the apparatus inside his head; he would fly into excited passion which seemed to him illimitable and emerged from his thoughts and into his words as the repeated phrase, the thing itself—what’s actually happening inside the brain. The thing itself. To render ourselves up to ourselves, to escape the words we’d grafted onto our experience before bioengineering, before brain science—to know what and who we really are.

He went rushing into labs to study computational language. He went rushing into South American jungles, rafting downriver from cloud forests through denser and denser foliage to find cultures with non-standard-grammars. He wanted to know how different things could look while being precisely the same.

He was back at home at Pasadena tech with Maya’s knee kinked over his illimitable possibility. He was coding his thesis project, the Babel fish, an homage to the little fish in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that could translate any intergalactic language into any intergalactic language. He didn’t want translation word-for-word, or even sentiment-to-sentiment—too abstract—but thing itself to thing itself.

“Come on back to bed,” she would say from the warm-orange glow in front of the fireplace.

Those nights with her, early on, he felt he really did know the thing itself. Maybe it was her. She would pick up one of the bioengineering articles off his desk—one of the ones in Spanish; there was an engineering group from Madrid that he followed—and she would say, “Read it to me,” with a smile in her eyes and just the right amount of playful lust in her voice.

“Oh no,” he would laugh to her. He knew what she wanted: for him to read it to her in his over-the-top, seductive Spanish voice. After all his travels and all his phonetics courses, he could do a perfect whispery-seductive, passionate Don Juan—the type you might hear on a Spanish telenovela—over-the-top, gushing with capacity to make parodic flamenco dancers swoon.

“Oh, read it to me, read it to me!” she would say.

“Oh no,” he would demure.

“Oh, read it to me!”

“Oh sí!” he would suddenly say, with over-the-top passion.

“Oh!” she would say, trying to mimic his accent, pretending to swoon as pretend señoritas pretend to swoon.

Then he would read in Spanish, “Not just the languaging apparatus or the distribution of linguistic function in generalizable maps over the brain, but the very nature of ourselves, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, the manner in which we understand our actions, our thoughts, our...” and she would swoon the mock swoon, which was a real swoon.

“Oh, my sweet,” he would continue, embracing her by the waist with his arms flexed and tightened in a histrionic masculinity. “I will take you my sweet rose,” he would say, pronouncing rose like hhhrooohsse, formed in the top front of the mouth, with the lips like a square, the tongue like a spoon bent upward not touching. And through all the humor they would end up unclothed, together and cozy, warm-orange glowing on their bed before the fire. Sometime after, she would say, “Some things never change,” to whatever he had never said about bioengineering, then roll on top of him to prove it.

But something changed. They changed. Or they just stayed the same and got older. They became more so what they were the whole time. Only the background, the world around them, was different. They had a daughter now.

Alone at Sommelier School, sitting in that individual teaching room, waiting for his teacher, David was still the David he had always been. He could do anything. Only now, the same illimitable possibility that had meant he could do anything now meant he had done nothing while trying to do everything. He was still a Ph.D. student. He had started calling himself a Ph.D. candidate because he was embarrassed to call himself a student. His wife had moved on, twice. Now she had the fancy suits one wears to a boutique firm.

Sure, he had a few journal articles to his name, but he had repeatedly given up on projects that could have capped his degree.

Those projects weren’t profound enough, he had told himself.

He was being too picky, she had told him.

He was being appropriately picky, he had told her.

Back then, he hated the algorithms people used for natural language processing. He hated the algorithms people used for what they still misleadingly called artificial intelligence. He hated the algorithms people used for machine learning. They often got the job done, more or less, but they weren’t the thing itself. They didn’t even bother to do what the brain was actually doing.

“We simply don’t know what the brain is actually doing, yet,” she said.

“You’re right, but—”

“You could easily graduate on this algorithm alone and start a company,” she said.

“But it’s not the thing itself,” he said. “It’s not beautiful!”

“But it works,” she said.

When it had happened, he didn’t think much of this exchange, but lately, he had begun remembering it often. He thought of it when she left her post-doctoral position for industry. He thought of it when she started blow-drying her hair. She had never done that. He thought of it when she mentioned Goodworth just slightly too often. He thought of it at Sommelier School, sitting alone in his doctor’s office of a teaching room, his wife just called away by background voices that chimed and gleamed like wrist watches and fancy cars. He thought of it as he was waiting for his private sommelier to join him, to convey to him what he’d always known was happening, would happen, between him and his wife, but never quite could name.

~

The door opened. Alfred himself entered.

“So you’re the lucky one,” he said with great elocution, but in a voice slightly different than his stage voice. “I will be your guide.”

He was the same Alfred, but there was something different about him. David felt as though he were in a magician’s dressing room after all the magic was done—what on stage was all smiles and ha-ha-ha laughter was now a little more relaxed, less scripted, more real.

“Okay. I confess,” Alfred said. “It wasn’t luck. I chose you because of your application.” He pulled up a chair with a respect-among-equals way about him, like a doctor treating another doctor. “You undoubtedly already know how this weekend will go?”

“I think so.”

“The wine metaphor only takes us so far, of course.”

“Sure.”

“When you’re after the thing itself, you can revel in the glory of knowing the brain,” said Alfred, building himself to a mild crescendo, “but then of course you inevitably realize: every brain is different… every thing itself… is different.”

“Sure.”

“That we can communicate at all is in some sense miraculous.”

“You really did read my application.”

Alfred stood up then moved behind David. “Lean back please,” he said. David did as he was told, resting his head snugly in the headrest. “Are you ready to begin?”

“Yes.”

Alfred continued his explanation, almost as if he hadn’t heard David: “To even speak of ‘a thousand different emotions’”—he set the phrase apart with his vocal inflection—“makes little sense. Sure, there are experiences we can evoke by, say, stimulating afferents to the dorsal amygdala. And we call this one precisely that, stimulation of afferents to the dorsal amygdala, as we should...” he paused as if for a minute he were back on stage, “...but we do so much more than that. Even our 6412 from this morning is much more complex than a mono-directed excitation. And,” he paused, adjusting the apparatus on David’s head, “try as we do,” he paused, “we can’t guarantee that 6412 will be exactly the same… person to person. In fact, we know, mathematically… it isn’t.”

“You know,” David responded. “Hitchcock once famously said if we as a society knew how to hook in directly and instill terror, he wouldn’t have bothered to make—”

David felt a wild surge within him that became a wide-eyed and open-mouthed scream. He screamed with all the abandon of a cartoon character whose tongue sticks way out and undulates frantically, kinking in all directions. Then all at once it was over.

“Terrific,” David said, still wide-eyed.

“Excellent word choice, sir.”

David returned to himself with the almost-smiling, flushed and still wide-eyed exhilaration of one just landed from a sky-dive.

Alfred went on: “Much of what we do, why people are here, isn’t for… well, forgive me, but... for the simple emotions,”—his voice did what it could to italicize this phrase, to effect the intellectual equivalent of a nose pinch at the offensive stench of its falsehood—“not that there are any such things. We’re usually not just stimulating here or impeding there. We’re creating complex concerted action, and we have to modulate according to what’s already going on… in here—” he paused, then rested his hand on David’s head, “—the life you’re bringing with you here today. Apprehension, for instance… or troubles at home?”

“Tell me about it.”

“And not just today or tomorrow, but across greater timescales. We have to modulate according to what you and I agree might be carelessly stuffed into the word personality, the notion, so-named, of culture.”

“Whole generations,” said David.

“Epochs,” said Alfred. “Now,” he paused. “Today, we build. Tomorrow, we flourish. Not to tease...” he waited long enough to ensure that his teasing intent was clear, “but tomorrow you’ll have the option to feel but one of our grandest experiences, the great oneness, for example, or moderato—”

“Moderato?”

“Moderato, you ask? I thought you might ask. One of our truly exquisite experiences. Yes. And quite a difficult one at that. But there’s a reason tragedy is as popular today as it was a hundred years ago. And many years before that.” One had the sense that Alfred was conjuring his stage persona. “I confess,” he went on, “I confess: we quite expended ourselves with cross-cultural and historic research before we even dreamed we’d reached a consensus. And, yes, I confess still further: some of us still disagree… on whether we’ve attained it.”

“What is it?”

“Moderato. It’s short for Elgar’s Cello Concerto in e minor – I. Adagio-Moderato—how he must have felt while writing it, while feeling it, the all-of-humanity-sized lamentation for something lost, ruined after the fashion of ruin’s etymological origin, relating not just to something broken, but to something fallen. Empires, say. Families, say. Or selves. Fallen where they needn’t have been—ruined, they say, voluntarily, or at least, theoretically so. It is the great destruction which at least seems voluntary, and so, in its inescapability, conjures the notion of deeper laws, lamentable flaws in human nature. We chose this, one feels, as one looks out over the dead bodies and mortar-scoured, bomb-blackened trenches of World War I, the sudden aimlessness of the future—how useless it all was, how avoidable, if only it weren’t for deeply written inevitability.” He paused again; he let the silence fill David with the notion of heads bowed in reverence. “Moderato,” he said. “It is to realize who we are and what we are leaving to our children. Moderato,” he said. “It is not just loss; one can smash apart the beautiful, and such is not, in and of itself, moderato.” A final inhale then. “Moderato,” he said. “Moderato cannot be… without a wide contemplation of the future.”

He was suddenly cheerful again, stage cheerful. “Just one of the many we’re building toward… tomorrow!” he said. “Of course, you won’t be able to experience them all, so you’ll have to choose. But something tells me you’ll go for this one!” Before David could say anything Alfred cut in on himself to say, “How about some relief?”

“What?”

“We call it that, relief zero four—the feeling you might get if you lost someone you cared about, say, your daughter, in a department store, then suddenly found her and scooped her up in your arms and felt… well… relieved, even though you were trying to be angry, and, as you cried just a little bit, you brushed her beautiful cheek and kept saying things like, don’t ever do that again.”

“Sure,” David said.

He felt as Alfred said he would, but not exactly as he had expected. With words only, one cannot expect exactly.

Then Alfred shut it down. “A fine vacation from how you’ve been feeling?”

“How have I been feeling?”

“I suppose I already said this earlier, but perhaps I have not made it obvious enough: we can tell how you’ve been feeling by what our device must do to instill, for example, relief zero four. Just now… well… let’s just say, if the machine could wheeze and sputter and heave like a big boy after wind sprints, it would.”

“I can imagine.”

“You’d be amazed at how hard some experiences are to invoke in some people. To make those in mourning elated is… some people worry that it taxes their brains too much.

“In fact,” Alfred went on, “there are those among us who worry—it is quite the wringing of hands, I admit—who worry that certain historic ways of being are lost to us. Yes, yes, I know. Some say the nature of how we now construct the idea of ourselves—almost entirely in reference to how we perceive others as perceiving us, much more so than in epochs past—renders aspects of, or types of, we’ll say other-centeredness impossible. Oh, I can show you what I mean in a moment! Or perhaps I can’t show you?” Then before David could say anything, Alfred said: “But for now… let’s see… hmm… how have you been feeling? Try this:”

David suddenly felt just slightly different than himself—he couldn’t find the words.

“Hang on,” Alfred said. “You’ll feel… think of the difference between C Major and C Major 7. Just one white piano key more, but all the expanse between heaven and earth, or heaven and… ah! There. There?”

“Are you doing anything?” David asked, almost, almost himself.

“Almost nothing, but to invoke this in our volunteer from this morning I would have had to...”

David was silent.

“I noticed the empty chair this morning,” Alfred said, then to David’s silence he added, “the premonition of ruin which is theoretically avoidable but impossible to avoid, owing to one’s nature, but—no, no—not yet, not now, not like moderato, because for you, this premonition, this loss, it is—if you’ll forgive me sir—it is a loss you want to bring upon yourself?”

David said nothing.

“And please forgive me, sir, but is it not combined with something close to a classic 447?”

“447?”

“One’s mate, one’s spouse, suddenly, seemingly available to everyone but oneself. An eager, angry will to action, old as time itself.”

“She’s coming up tonight.”

“Certainly,” said Alfred, with the irony only those who serve others professionally have perfected. Then he said, “You’ll pardon my forwardness in all this introduction, but I thought, with someone like you, someone with your background, simply starting with I-before-E-except-after-C would not inspire the requisite confidence.”

“You weren’t wrong.”

“Still, we must proceed through a few of the early lessons. You’d be surprised at how useful they can be… as we build toward tomorrow.”

“Do you have anything stronger?” asked David, ignoring Alfred’s suggestion.

“Stronger, sir?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes, I believe I do, but—”

“Something like what I’m feeling, but more...”

There was a great silence then. Alfred said nothing.

Then another great silence. David said nothing.

Still another great silence. Alfred demurred, hopefully, but uselessly.

David, silent again, declined again to cease the echo of silences bouncing between them.

“Crimes of passion,” said Alfred, knowingly, reluctantly, breaking the fifth silence. “You’d be surprised how many people want to feel more so, even as they swear they’d rather feel any other way.”

“Not that surprised.”

“Alright,” said Alfred, with the somberly acquiescing tone that carries within itself the phrase, but I don’t advise it. “We’ll do it,” he added, “but then we’ll circle back to the earlier lessons?” Alfred was an experienced teacher. Sometimes one makes deals with refractory students. The hardest ones to teach are those who think they already know.

“Agreed,” said David.

“Alright,” Alfred said again, but this time with the conspiratorial air of a pawnbroker in a seedy crime movie. I see you’re looking for the real thing, come with me into the back room—where I keep the stolen goods. “Crimes of passion...” he said, then he stopped. “Names are...” he began again. “I confess to you, my dear sir, as one confesses the greatest crime: even here, at Sommelier School, we don’t always name with perfection. This one—” He spoke of crimes of passion with reverence; his voice handled it as cautious hands handle explosive material “—it shouldn’t exactly be called ‘crimes of passion’. The name ‘crimes of passion’ would be more appropriate to a sort of blind, animal rage, uncontrollable, existing only in a memory known for the first time over blood-dried hands.” He stopped to let the image bloom like a fast-motion flower, the blood… now flaky and semi-transparent on his knuckles. “This is not that. One does not feel ‘crimes of passion’ proper as it happens. But our crimes of passion?

“Even here,” he went on, “we make nomenclature mistakes—taxonomic tragedies, I call them—” he expelled air from his nose once to indicate approval of his own phrase, “—history itself, human nature, balking at our endeavor. It’s simple, really: system designers have their idiosyncrasies—system designers always do—easter eggs even, little jokes inside the software.”

“Is 447 a unix permissions joke?” David asked.

“Quite a distasteful one, yes. All permissions given to the public, but with the primary user given just read-only permissions. Nonsensical in computing, but… in relation to one’s spouse?”

“Ha.” David found it not at all funny.

“As I was saying. Our crimes of passion, it is the animal rage to be sure—as you will soon feel—but it carries with it something… how shall we say… something calculating. Think of a steel spring, potential energy compressing and compressing into its animal haunches just before it strikes; it is the energy just before the explosion, not the explosion itself, something collected, concerted, the pre-crescendo; it knows what blindness will soon take over, and it wants the blindness; it plans for the blindness; it wants the moment, needs the moment, the moment of revelation, the moment of vengeance, attack and demise. It knows. It needs the grotesquery, the anger even as it feels the great tragedy of something it has brought upon itself. It knows it has no one to blame, and so wants the pinpoint moment of complete destruction to be—I don’t know how to say this—to be perfect.

“Are you ready?” Alfred suddenly asked.

“Almost.”

“But you don’t mean that, do you?”

“No.”

“So you’re ready?”

“Willing.”

“Of course,” said Alfred, then after a great hesitation he nearly whispered, “Experience.” He spoke the word experience as one might whisper, listen.

Experience.

David felt a glorious, beautiful hatred then, a hatred which bore within its ugly face the one true, terrible recognition, a hatred at once animal, directed, sharp, and uncontrollably measured, but a hatred which he greeted, could greet, as if it were an old friend come from long ago, lives ago, to help him become, to help his family become, what it was always meant to be.

He felt the power that comes only from an absence of consequences, the absence of time. There was no future but five minutes hence. A bedroom door kicked clean off its hinges. There was only one purpose, and the world was close up around him like thick walls encircling his eyes from two inches out. There was no creativity or capacity for novelty. Space and time a single twisted rope pulling him by the waist to its point of origin, like a twisted bed sheet, tugging and tugging toward the only knowledge the world had ever known. There was elegance in the planning because there never had been any other plan, his body tightening and tightening down into the one great biophysical certainty: a pounding of fists. His eyes flared open, his lungs expanded, his body slowed—controlled, concerted, modulated—with the horrible will of the universe, the great orchestral impulse within him, just as the symphony slows before the crash—the entirety of it all, the conductor’s arms, the instruments themselves, slowing just so—it isn’t written in the music, but it happens all the same, the slightest tension on the reins of time—a held breath’s moment behind the inescapable truth about to burst in crescendo. How much rage can you squeeze into such a moment? How long can you lag behind time as written before the composition collapses? The crescendo always crashes just before it would have been too late. The white hot rage is all there is, just before it becomes its purpose.

“Alright,” said Alfred, now with the harried tone of someone stopping an experiment to save the participant. “The machine had to work for that one, but, as I’m sure you know, not quite so much as I would have liked.”

David wiped his forehead and breathed the breath of a person just narrowly missed being hit by a bus.

“Now you really know,” Alfred said, not explaining himself. “Maybe tomorrow instead of moderato you should choose bonhomie, or the great oneness? We have Love of God, the Father, if you’d like, or, as some of us call it, Awe of Universe, the Gender-Neutral Guardian. It’s up to you, of course. The great reconciliation is within your reach, if only you elect it.”

Before David could respond Alfred said, with false exclamation, “Ah yes, we had a deal!” He was the teacher who pretends to remember the student’s promise he has never really forgotten. “Let’s head back and go through some of our preliminary material?”

“Yes,” David whispered. “Yes. Let’s get started right away, please.”

~

At ten o’ clock David’s phone rang. He stood up from the dining table. The big room had been set for a late dinner.

“I haven’t left yet,” Maya said through the phone as David walked out into the hallway.

He didn’t say anything.

“Do you think maybe I could wait till tomorrow morning to come up?” She wasn’t asking.

He thought frustratedly of going back into the dinner—another empty chair. “If you weren’t going to make it by ten, why did you say you would, and so definitively? You could have just said you weren’t sure when you were going to make it.”

“Fine,” she said, now snarky, a response to his tone. “I’m not sure when I’ll make it.”

“But you’re coming up tomorrow morning?”

“I’m not sure when I’ll make it.”

Goodworth spoke in the background. Whatever he said sounded an awful lot like, Your husband is away for the weekend?

“You know what,” David said, “why don’t you just stay home. Don’t bother coming up at all.” He wanted desperately for her to say, no no I’ll come tomorrow, I’ll come now. To object. Anything.

She said nothing.

“Just stay home. Cancel the sitter. You didn’t want to come anyway.”

“I can come,” she said.

Right then he knew. All he needed to do was say: Yes, yes. Okay. I’m sorry. I want you to come because I miss my wife, and I don’t like what this is becoming and how avoidable but inevitable it all seems. But he didn’t say this. Instead he said, “No. By now you’ve missed half of it anyway. Just stay home.”

“Not half.”

“Half. There’s nothing but breakfast on Sunday. Just stay home. It’s fine. You won’t even get to feel the great moderato as wide and deep as—”

“What are you talking about?”

“Nevermind. Just stay home. It’s fine really.” He was being snotty. “You probably wouldn’t get it anyway.”

“Fine. You know what, Goodworth and I have plenty to do this weekend. So I guess I will just stay home.”

“Good,” he said. “Good. In fact, why don’t you both just work at the house tomorrow. I bet you’d like that. That way we can cancel the sitter. Like you said, we can’t really afford to hire babysitters with one of us still in grad school anyway. You go ahead. You two kids can have the house to yourself.”

“You know what, fine,” she said. “Goodworth and I will work at the house tomorrow, just because you asked for it. Have it your way.”

“Good,” he said. “I’m glad I could help. In fact, why don’t you just have him stay over tonight—that way he’ll be there bright and early, all chipper for the morning.”

“Just stop,” she said. “That’s enough.” But she felt a twinge of excitement when he said it. “You’re being ridiculous.”

“Am I?”

She didn’t say, your words were ridiculous until they were spoken. She only said, “I need to go. He’s calling for me now.”

“Fine,” he said. “Bye.”

They both hung up.

~

There was wine at the dinner. Big glass bowls of it on slender stems. Like melted, golden grapes in the candlelight. Sweet against his bitterness, his recognition that he could blame only himself for his 447—all permissions ceded to the public. He had been a bioengineering Don Juan once. But now? He drank the golden bowls with all the imprecise demon-banishing of someone self-administering electro-convulsive therapy. Be gone, ye bitter mix of self-loathing and enmity, sweet-longing and hatred, this knowledge that all you need to do is say you’re sorry, this certainty that you can’t do all you need to do. He spoke a few absent phrases to the people on either side of him. He was not there. All he would remember was the soft yellow light and the people who were initially gregarious toward him turned the other way. He drank. He was thinking of his wife. He could just stand up, walk out into the hallway, call her, and apologize. You were being an ass. That’s all you have to do. He drank. She can call you back and apologize if she wants. No. Don’t be stupid. You are bringing about your own demise. Demise? What’s a demise? A death, but really a transference of sovereignty, an abdication. To Goodworth. He had quite literally said so. Take him home with you tonight. Abdicated. The deed to his family. Another bowl of honey-colored regret. Why are some avoidable actions inevitable?

~

He awoke late. The numbers on his clock meant he had missed the plenary session. Alfred would be angry, but politely so.

He was still wiping his eyes when he walked past the empty ballroom. He opened the door to his individual room.

“Two empty chairs this morning,” said Alfred, smiling his usual, deferential but knowing smile. “I don’t like such things.”

“You and me both.”

“You’re ready now?”

“Almost,” he said. “Almost.”

“Today’s the day,” he said. “Moderato,” he said, then realizing his assumption added, “...perhaps. Whatever you choose. Or perhaps have already chosen? The final flourish. The end. Will your wife be joining you?”

“I doubt it,” he said. “We decided she would stay home with our daughter. We canceled our babysitter.” As David spoke he imagined the consequences of last night. He knew Maya wouldn’t invite Goodworth to sleep over. Too much trespass all at once. But he knew she could justify a few hours of work in their home, then a lunch perhaps, maybe with wine… ease into it. He saw his wife sitting with that man in their quiet house which whispered of trespasses and anonymity. The quiet was so different when sitting snug between his wife and this invader. Isabel would be sleeping. He wished she were awake to intervene. He wished she were sitting right there on the table like a splay-legged doll you prop forward so it won’t fall backward. He wished she were there in place of the baby monitor. But no. She would be sleeping, unaware as only the not-yet-ready next generation can be. Laugh, Isabel. Laugh. Laugh your static, faraway laugh to break them apart before it’s too late. As he sat in the chair for another day of learning, he felt increasing urgency—the awful premonition that what was still undone was already inevitable.

“You missed a fine introduction this morning… if I do say so myself,” Alfred said with a stage smile in his voice as he moved behind David.

“Do you have anything for how it feels to bring about a feared outcome partially because you fear it and are trying to avoid it but also in some strange way because there’s some self-destructively insecure part of you that wants it to happen so you can experience the acute but not completely unwanted sting of self-pity?”

“Of course!” said Alfred. “It’s a classic!” Then seeing David’s face he said somberly. “But perhaps we should get warmed up with a few of the simpler—”

“Let’s just skip ahead to moderato,” said David.

“You wouldn’t prefer to—”

“That’s what we’re building toward, right? So let’s just do it.”

“We’re building toward whatever you wish, sir. You can still choose reconciliation o niner, or serenity, or perhaps the most popular, oneness with—You can still choose!”

“Somehow it doesn’t feel that way from where I’m sitting.”

Maya was sitting with Goodworth at the kitchen table after their lunch. There was a lull, a moment of uncertain expectation, time undirected, anticipation in the silence between them—that heady moment after a meal when everyone is finished but goodbyes are not yet said.

Everything was simple then. He was a man, and she was a woman. She looked at him, at ease in another man’s home, at ease with another man’s wife. She was a client, or a brokerage account, easy to understand, circumscribed and circumscribable—not, as David would say, a complex concerted action of billions of ever-changing cells orchestrated according to laws writ deeply in the Universe and tending back ever toward those laws, something deeper than “gender” and “life”, but simply a woman, a woman with beautiful hair and beautiful eyes and a degree in something-or-other, a woman in a simple, twenty-ruled game without regard for anything else, markets and good wine and boobs and his shirt, a woman who could have an affair if she wanted to with a man in a kitchen, at this very table, or in their bedroom, on her bed. She looked at him through his own eyes—maybe that was his great power, his ability to make others as simple as he was—and she felt what one always feels right before an affair: unquenchable excitement understood alongside the remorse which has already begun. Words are funny—if she had gone to Sommelier School she would better appreciate just how. This excitement is perhaps just a name for the remorse when it first begins: one big, wide, body-wide concerted experience which rises like the beginning of a roller coaster in a way we want to call nervous, horny excitement, a fast-forward motion rolling downward along the very same, but differently named, track—the dip we call remorse. She didn’t know or feel or care about complexity. She wanted it this way. She was nervous, horny, excited. He wanted her this way.

“I’m glad I finally had a chance to see your home,” he said.

“My daughter is sleeping,” was all she could say in response. Early remorse is breathless excitement. “My daughter is sleeping.”

“Give me crimes of passion again,” David said to Alfred. This wasn’t a desire for catharsis. This was… When someone has a truth inside them that can hurt us as bad as we can be hurt, we want it, we need it, we beg them for it. Stay home with that man. My wife, tell me how you really feel. Did you feel this way before I asked you to tell me how you really feel? We make it more true by begging for it. He thought of his Maya at home with that man. He wanted to imagine, to feel, what he still wouldn’t admit possible. We all want to imagine our end.

He felt it. Crimes of passion. He sat back and twisted his jaw as the violent, vengeful tumult roiled within him.

“Sorry, hold on a second please,” said Alfred. “I just can’t get the machine to...”

It had been all him.

Then Alfred said, “Oh there, it’s on now...” he hesitated audibly, looking on as the machine did almost nothing. “Sir,” he said, “perhaps I could interest you in some domestic bliss?”

“I’m leaving,” David said, rising abruptly.

“But sir, this afternoon will be the best part! The climax! We will mix, and we will mash, and we will… like something you’ve never felt before!”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” he said on his way out.

At home he heard a murmur coming from upstairs. The whole drive his heart had thundered with the premonition of terrible loss, the loathing disrespect mixed with unwilled self-effacement, the sting of permissions ceded away, the need for tearful, mock-angry relief. And yet, he could not help but admire, with some distant and almost muted part of himself, how he had caused it to happen.

He was in his kitchen. The murmur upstairs might just be Maya, alone, cooing to Isabel. But no. He saw the two wine glasses, then he heard something sultry, an innuendo in the inflection of the murmur upstairs, and all he could think was crimes of passion, crimes of passion… and what scared him most wasn’t that he felt he could run up the stairs in a wild and blinded animal rage, but that the crimes of passion pre-crescendoed so concertedly within his veins that he could take off his shoes, slowly now, and tip-toe with vengeful precision up the stairs, those quiet, carpeted stairs, those conspiring stairs. He would catch them. This wouldn’t be as good if they had time to move apart. He would catch them entangled—one-two, one-two—crimes of passion, all the instruments flying at once. He knew he would need no weapon.

Top of the stairs. His bedroom door was down the hallway. End of the hallway. His marriage room. His marriage bed. He saw his barbarian self, but minutes in the future. He crept toward the bedroom door with crimes of passion clenching his jaw and clenching his animal fists. So close, so close, he could almost understand the words that were still just murmurs, the urgent whispers that were filled with the sounds that always mean, keep going… keep going… He could almost hear the words. He wanted to hear the words. We always want to hear the words. His toes sunk deeply into the carpet, tense; he could launch himself at anything, predator or prey. But suddenly he saw through the open door to his right, into the darkened room, his daughter, Isabel, sweet Isabel, sleeping—she had been there forever and ever—and he saw the future then, entirely other than what could have been, avoidable by him or by her, but charged into by both, like something needed, or like a war that everyone knows can be stopped but no one has the sense to stop. He entered the darkened room where his daughter slept, the crimes of passion raging within him, but with Isabel’s rising, breathing chest—baby-sized, and unaware—he felt something suddenly bigger and bolder and wider and deeper come from somewhere so much further down, big enough and wide enough to cup the crimes of passion like an open hand rising from beneath a fluttering moth. He lay his hand, a father’s hand which feels the future within it, gently on his daughter’s chest which breathed peacefully to contrast the great premonition. He felt her little chest breathe in and out, and as the murmurs down the hall grew louder and more urgent, became the crescendo he knew was coming, through all his crimes of passion all he could feel was something huge, and all he could think—his daughter’s new life—was moderato, moderato, like some voice from within him knew that once the crimes of passion was done the concerto would be all there was left. Isabel, and Time. Moderato. Thus it was. It didn’t need to be this way. But thus it was. Moderato was the wide lamentation he felt under all his crimes of passion. And just then Maya shuddered from beneath the invader, for she too thought of Isabel, the deed complete, irrevocable, and moderato was the wide lamentation she felt under all her passion, but not in those words.

END

 ∞