What Should the Unemployed Thespian Do?

I recently spent a week on one of the Gulf Islands off the coast of Vancouver, a place now largely populated by lawyers who were once hippies—people who somehow had the good sense, back in the sixties, to buy land. For decades, they have been coming together for dinners after spending their days chopping firewood, and I was invited to one of these dinners. Twelve people sat around the table, including a woman in her late forties. She was blonde with wide-set eyes. She had the tense, dry look of an actress who no longer worked, which is what she turned out to be. She had done some CBC movies and B-movies in her day, and now taught drama to kids. “I am old,” she said, “and I am ugly.” She referred at least four times to her “European” cheekbones, and reminisced about her early, energetic days as an actress in Edmonton. Her whole monologue, her self-presentation, made my rhubarb pie taste like sand and dust. There are few conversations that spoil a meal more than the story of an actress who has outlived her career.

What do we do once we can no longer do what we did? It’s a problem for anyone, but it seems to affect the actor most acutely. Even when an actor is working, it’s not unusual for her to go entire weeks and months without a part. The customary thing is to take acting classes, work undemanding jobs, exercise, meditate, see friends, read plays. The actor’s life is about finding ways to fill in the time between gigs. Even when one has an acting job, there is still a lot of waiting around: while the lights are being moved, while make-up is being done. Once the actor’s career is over, I imagine there is still a sense of waiting, as though the spotlight might eventually return.

Sitting across from the actress at that dinner, I wondered how an actor might root herself, artistically, in these downtimes, or after her career is over; that is, how an actor can always be acting, and learn better how to act, and make the world better by acting.

1. CHARITY

I don’t want to say that the actor—any more than any other person—should spend her life in a charitable manner. But if the actor wants to imitate an action, what could be better for the world—and her own self—than to imitate selfless giving? Why shouldn’t the actor, in her off-hours, put herself at the disposal of old people, sick people, people who need help, and act the part of someone who cares? Acting caring leads to caring, and in this way actors might turn themselves into the most fulfilled and happy of all the artists. As it is, most actors can hardly take their eyes off themselves. The actor in this scenario must use narcissitic qualities to imitate the action that will bring her the most praise. Eventually, she will become worthy of genuine admiration. This discipline would be called “Acting Your Opposite.”

2. SUBMISSION TO A NOVELIST

Actors should put themselves at the disposal of writers, once in a while. What writer wouldn’t benefit from sitting in her easy chair and listening to an actor read out her day’s work? Playwrights know that it’s impossible to tell whether what they’ve written is good or bad until an actor speaks it out loud. Novelists rarely think this way, but they could. After all, readers speak the book silently to themselves in their heads. An actor reading a novel out loud is a simulation of the reader’s experience—the closest a novelist can get.

The hidden problem for the novelist is that she only ever reads her own work one way, forgetting that there are so many meanings in any one sentence, so many different intonations and interpretations. In this way, the novelist can hear her words in the cadence of someone other than herself. An actor could make herself very useful this way, and she would gain from performing for an audience of one—one who cares deeply about the words being said.

3. IMPERSONATING

One of the sad and strange—and perhaps most beautiful—things about humans is that there is only one of each of us. The problem for any individual in our culture is how to be oneself most authentically. The problem for any actor is how to best play a given part. The ordinary person strives to live in tune with her own wisdom and intelligence, her sense of what is right, her instincts and inclinations. The actor attempts to uncover these things in each role she plays.

Could there be a service that hooks up—for a lifetime, or some shorter length—an actor with an ordinary person, with the actor acting as that person’s clone? The actor would try to dress, speak and move like the person she is cloning (let’s call her Abigail), and poetically interpret her. She would try to understand Abigail’s cognitive pathways and emotional responses. There would never be a performance, just a perpetual following-around of Abigail. She would read Abigail’s emails. She would meet with Abigail’s friends, when Abigail was too tired. Trying, on a long-term basis, to get outside of herself and into just one other role would teach the actor so much more than any single theatre class. So many of the secrets of human nature are in the distance between who I am and who you are.

The actor would then become like a painter or writer, whose whole life is given over to the perfection of a master work. The in-between jobs would turn into gigs taken for money, like journalism often is for the novelist, or wedding portraits for the painter. The acting in those “in-between jobs” (that is, roles in plays, films and television) would become much more lifelike. This actor would know what a person truly was like, from her ongoing imitation of life. And how endless this task of imitation would be, since Abigail would be changing week in and week out, as humans supposedly do.

As for Abigail, she would get what many humans secretly loathe and crave: a witness and a mirror. To see oneself portrayed through the gestures of another person, to see oneself interpreted, is to know what we otherwise never know: how we appear to the world from the outside. I would hate to be the person having an actress following me around, but why should everything be so comfortable? Maybe having this real-life imitation would allow us to live in greater proximity to our insides—closer to our motivations and our fears.

~

I do not want to be an actress, yet I grew up wanting to be one. I acted and wrote from the time I was a child, but it gradually became clear to me that I was not good at acting. Though I had enthusiasm, I knew there were people who, while acting, had feelings I did not. As I acted, I looked at myself with scepticism and embarrassment.

Yet the person who is an actor in her bones—who needs to act but has to wait for an opportunity that doesn’t always come—probably dies a little inside from misuse. An actor who cannot act is like a cat that cannot lick its own fur. Every creature has its own nature, and happiness and fulfilment is being able to express that nature.

Of all the options I suggest for the actor, I think the last one—while the most unpleasant and dangerous—is best. Only when we throw ourselves into danger is anything of worth accomplished. We live in our cities, in our little homes. But we are animals, and we are primed to respond to threat. When we live lives with no real danger, our instincts find things that are not dangerous and make these things dangerous. So why not invite into one’s life something genuinely horrifying, and come face-to-face with oneself?

We should all have actors trailing us around. This would mean that all the other genuinely non-dangerous areas of your life would lose the sense of terror they currently carry. You would begin to feel real fear. As Mark Edmunson wrote in the New York Times:

Shakespeare's fools are subtle teachers, reality instructors one might say… Hamlet gets Yorick; Lear gets his Fool; Olivia, Feste; Rosalind, Touchstone… In Shakespeare, to have a fool attending on you is generally a mark of distinction. It means that you've retained some flexibility, can learn things, might change; it means that you're not quite past hope, even if the path of instruction will be singularly arduous. To be assigned a fool in Shakespeare is often a sign that one is, potentially, wise.

What actor doesn’t want to be useful—to be a real fool? Now go and find an actor to follow you around—you who want to change, to become wise. 

A Marriage Tract by Marie Stopes

At one point in my novel, Ticknor, the character of George Ticknor reads a "marriage pamphlet" which is handed to him by a woman in the street. I wrote this marriage pamphlet at the time of writing Ticknor, but I never put it in the book. It is adapted from the writings of Marie Stopes (1880-1958), a controversial birth control reformer.

It is not good to be alone. For some reason beyond our comprehension, nature has so created us that we are incomplete in ourselves. It has happened many times in human history that individuals have not only been able to conquer their natural craving for a mate, but have set up celibacy as a higher ideal. Many saints and sages, reformers and dogmatists have modelled their lives on such an ideal, but such individuals cannot be taken as the standard of the race.

However much he may conceal it under assumed cynicism, worldliness, or self-seeking, the heart of every young man yearns for the fulfilment of the beautiful dream of a life-long union with a mate. Perhaps you say to yourself that your history proves you unfit for love, unfit for learning, unfit for living, for society, for companionship. Yet those who set off on higher endeavour or who consciously separate themselves from the ordinary course of social life are comparatively few, and it is not to them I am speaking.

///

The best type of young man today is tired of polygamy. He has seen enough in his father’s and his friends’ lives of the weariness of the sinister, secret polygamy that rots the race under the protective cloak of the supposed monogamy of our social system. As for the man who desires companionship but cares not whether he finds it with one woman or many, I ask him: Of what value is a freedom that takes us from the arms of one person into the next without ever the promise of satisfaction or the relief of finding it? And will he not be wounded when he encounters a woman who rightly sees in the sex act a sacredness, or consider her chastity an insult on his desirability rather than what it is – a high regard for the dignity of his person? The debauched do not know that the infinite variety and colour in the life of the good is far sweeter than the difference between one night of vice and the next, where there is no coming to understanding. Its rule is eternal seeking and never resting. Its law is endless disappointment; a desire to love rather than loving.

A man may be tempted, but it is the rare woman who knowingly tempts a man. Often an older man will set an example and flaunt a lifestyle that is appealing, particularly to the young and unschooled, who do not witness what inner poverty such a life has wrought. He will disguise the true outcome of his wanderings, as often to himself as anyone else. With time the transgression becomes habitual and the stain on the character is deep and lasting. For with the ordinary man, the sexual impulse is seldom yielded to without remorse. The incontinent man is indulging a servant who, if he becomes a master, will be, as Cicero called him, a furious taskmaster. The sexual feeling has made many a misanthrope. The slave of his passions has no easy life.

///

The first time a kingdom is put in possession of liberty, the result is anarchy. The first time a child has a sharp-edged tool in his hand, he cuts his fingers. The first use a man makes of his every power and talent is a bad one. A man always misuses his talents and powers at first, and it is always through thinking that the evil is good and calling the good evil. But only having called the good evil and the evil good will he come to see which was in fact the good and which was the evil. It is not from being evil that a good man looks in evil places for the good – it is innocence first, ignorance later.

In some cases, the morality a man devises for himself in a time of innocence is insufficient to bring him happiness through the course of his life. Yet a man who has visited loose women in the night should not think himself unworthy of a true wife. Certainly it is a struggle that exists even in the most pious. The learned translator of Bishop Liguori said, “Do not allow your daughters to be taught letters by a man, though he be a St. Paul or St. Francis of Assissium. All the saints are in heaven.”

Once the passions of the flesh have too long been given the rule of the man, those qualities of patience and self-sacrifice which ennoble the soul will have been so corrupted and lost to sight that it is no surprise when a man views with a sceptical eye the possibility of a life beyond the realm of his most basic desires. Man must be cautious of forming for himself rules to live by at too unschooled an age.

///

The pleasures of the immoral life are apparent to the most noble, but the pleasures of the good life are deep rooted, hidden from those who would only linger there awhile. The pleasures of the good life do not offer themselves to the passer-by. They does not dress themselves up in rubies and gold. The attractions of the immoral life are like the dresses of a showgirl, all glitter on the surface, but flimsy.

Man’s opportunities for exploration in the cities are few, and the loose woman is one of the most obvious doors for escape into new experiences. He will see in those immoral adventures the source of whatever happiness he has managed to feel, in spite of its numbing effect on his spirit, and he will not attribute his unhappiness to that life when he has managed to extract a few passing pleasures from it. It is no wonder that many of our best men seek not beauty but ugliness, and seek not thoughts and experiences that cannot elevate their spirits but which only reassure them that they cannot be elevated at all.

///

He who is not moral cannot be happy. Yet when the young man, who for so long has heard preaching about the pleasures of the moral life, finally starts on the road to this life, he often discovers only the absence of the pleasures that his life of immorality offered him. Having come so close to touching what is right, such a man will no sooner escape and return to what he knows – the frustrated wanderings of the debauchee, which, being familiar, will cause him none of the discomfort of the good. Such a man will no doubt reassure himself that the good he touched was truly evil, and he will forever be lost.

It is only when he stops trying to gain the same joys from the good as he gained from the evil that he will discover new and different sensations, and will come to value these above the pleasures of his former life. In time, his feelings of unworthiness and confusion, and his discomfort at not finding the pleasures he expected will cease, and he will regard whatever pleasures he took from his career of vice to have been shallow and fleeting, and the happiness he gains from the moral life to be rich and lasting. He will grow satisfied and at last feel at rest.

///

Many an unmarried man fears his capacity for patience, loyalty, devotion, love – qualities he fears will separate him from the dazzling diversity of life’s riches. Yet it is these very qualities which bring him reward. If a man is in a position to marry, by all means let him do so. Marriage is the one tried form of insurance a man has for a life of health and happiness – if the woman is a good one. If she is not, he is sure to encounter immeasurable griefs. Still, there are enough worthy women in all the ranks that when a man has the good fortune to find himself with one, he would be worse than a fool to hold to her indifferently, without thought of the future. It is exactly such a woman who can raise the man she loves out of the squalor in which he is living, and the man who does not seize on the opportunity to be saved will seldom find himself saved.

///

If he encounters his life’s love early, by all means, let him marry early. The man who marries at a tender age more easily adapts his or her personality to that of his partner, and better sexual adjustments result. If his sexual desires are strong and his intellectual powers not great, early marriage will keep him out of much mischief and temptation. I am compelled to endorse marriage as a most important sanitary measure, alike for enabling a reasonable gratification of the sexual instinct as for the avoidance of disease.

///

In marriage, each one dreams that he will find the Understander, the one from whom he may set out into the world in search of treasures of knowledge and experience, and before whom the spoils may be exhibited without thought of rivalry, and with the certainty of glad appraisal. Treasures dear to our own hearts but of no value to others should here find appreciation, and it is here the tender, supersensitive germ of an idea may be watered and tended till its ripe beauty is ready to burst forth upon the world. The exquisite, unselfish tenderness which is aroused in a man by a sense of mental and spiritual harmony with a wife who sympathises with him because she understands his needs is one of the loveliest things in a marriage. A wife who knows how to waken this tenderness in a man raises him out of the self-centred slough in which so many men wallow unhappily. Of this palpitating, winged, livéd thing, which one may perhaps call the Real Marriage, I would say little, for indeed it is only fitting and possible to speak of it by indirect language and suggestion, lest one risk rudely dragging it from its sanctuary into the light of common gaze.

///

More than ever today are happy homes needed, and the man who pleases his wife sexually will reap the rewards in devotion, affection and understanding. The man who has never desired to do this may be suffering from a real malady; sexual anaesthesia. This is the name given to an inherent coldness, the lack of the usual human impulse of tenderness, while being quite unconscious of the lack.

///

It is never easy to make marriage a lovely thing; it is an achievement beyond the powers of the selfish and the mentally cowardly. Many men find themselves lacking the knowledge that is needed for a happy sexual union, but are too embarrassed to admit it. Then there are the less corrupted, still more innocent men whose heads are filled with romance and who know nothing about the sex-act, and when coming to it at last, satisfy not themselves nor their mate. It is my experience that in the early days of marriage the young man is even more sensitive, more romantic, more easily pained about all the ordinary things than the woman, and that he enters marriage hoping for an even higher degree of spiritual and bodily unity than does she.

When a Lancashire lad says I love you, it means far more than a poet would get into many verses.

///

No man wants to begin his marriage as his father did, fumbling in the dark and winning the disappointment of his young bride. Over time, the wife who is not pleased sexually will grow cold toward her husband. When she is left sleepless through the neglect of the mate who slumbers soundly by her side, it is not surprising if she spends the long hours reviewing their mutual position. Deprived of the physical delight of orgasm, she sees in the sex act an arrangement where pleasure, relief and subsequent sleep are all on her husband’s side, while she is merely the passive instrument of his enjoyment. More than that, if following every union she has long hours of wakefulness, she also sees clearly the encroachment on her own health of an arrangement in which she is not merely passive but actively abused.

The husband who loves his wife as a mistress, ignores her as a mother, and hates her for the irritability and hysteria which he himself has produced, is a criminal! And this is a view taken by many of our noblest men.

///

A man must consider whether he knows how to satisfy a woman, before he proposes to spend his life with one. If he is ignorant, let him seek out knowledge. There are few women who complain to their best friends that their husband pleases them too much. A man must learn that if his marriage is to be any joy, if his house is to be truly a home, then his duty will have to be carried out with knowledge.

In the normal woman, especially of the higher social classes, the sexual instinct is acquired, not inborn, and since there is so little in place to educate women, it is men who must be educated – even those isolates who have encountered women only in their dreams.

///

It is my regret that in our nation we allow our young people to go so under-educated in the art of marriage and sex. There are many men who live on the streets for fear of marrying, or who could have married but grew scared at the crucial moment, simply because they suspected they would not be able to perform as men with their beloved.

There also exist men who have enjoyed the company of prostitutes and so believe themselves to be beyond instruction, while it is rather the case that often these are the most in need of instruction. When men look to prostitutes for the sexual psychology of women, they find only their own mirror. The prostitute is an automaton. In her private life she may be a woman, but in her work she is but a machine created by man, made to respond more like man than woman. Resultantly, for many men who have lived their lives on the streets, the idea that a woman is in truth so differently stirred from himself is a revelation.

For most men, it is enough to think passingly of the female form to become sexually aroused. Thus, the young husband who observes that one week his tender love-making and romantic advances win his wife to smiles and joyous yielding, then perhaps a few days later the same, or more impassioned tenderness on his part is met by coldness or a forced appearance of warmth, will be left bewildered. He does not understand that a woman’s body has its own seasons. Misunderstanding this, and while he may make no comment upon her behaviour, her moods hurt him acutely. Men like to feel that their beloved is a rational being, and this deep and inexplicable hurt is often the beginning of the end of love, if the husband is misinformed.

Woman has her own, developed, not infrequent rhythm, but as it does not equal man’s he has tended to ignore and override it, coercing her at all times and seasons. Often a man will be blind not merely to what his wife’s rhythms are, but to the very fact of herhaving them.

The over-stimulation of city life tends to speed up the man’s reactions but to retard hers. The majority of men have grown up thinking that women should submit to frequent, even nightly, intercourse. For the sake of a few moments of physical pleasure such men lose realms of ever-expanding joy and tenderness. It is the greatest mistake to imagine that the semen is something to be got rid of quite frequently. All the vital energy and the precious chemical substances which go into its composition can be better utilized by being transformed into other creative work on most days of the month.

///

The best regulation of intercourse in marriage for the benefit of both the husband and the wife is to have three or four days of repeated unions, followed by about ten days without any unions at all, unless some strong external stimulus has stirred a mutual desire.

To fail to render a woman ready before uniting with her is an act of inhumanity. Thus, we advise the married man to touch his wife under the skin, near the entrance, and to rub her lightly there or with force, more or less vigorously, as the woman desires. By stimulating her in this way, lubricate will begin to form inside her in readiness for the entrance of the male.

Few men need to be told that it is good to fondle a woman’s breasts in lovemaking, but few know that the purpose of this is not to have felt them oneself but to have caressed them in such a way – softly, not with the clumsy handling of a schoolboy – as to make the woman feel sensual and responsive.

Gentle kisses on all parts of her frame will show a woman that her husband takes delight in every part of her body.

Techniques such as these may render a woman ready for the affections of her mate, and the others can be discovered by a man and his wife together through practise. Continual discoveries are necessary, for a woman’s body is ever-changing, ever responding to the influences of her environment.

///

The man who is not roused by the tender blush of satisfaction in the cheeks of the woman he loves cannot call himself a man, and he who has lost the art of stirring a chaste partner to physical love deprives his wife of a certain glamour, the loss of which he deplores. As for the man who finds his wife old or unattractive, he has missed out on the secret of the nature: that he can always make his wife beautiful and youthful simply by bringing her joy sexually. For the husband who even once loved his wife, seeing raptures on her face that he himself inspired will restore whatever youth, beauty and vigour she might have lost in the long years of tending to him.

Nature accords beauty and youth alike to the happy and healthy, and if people grow ashen and dour you can be certain that they have forgotten the sweetest lesson of youth: to love.

///

Many think that merely by loosening the bonds of marriage, making it possible to start afresh with someone else, their lives will be made harmonious and happy. But by many such reformers it is forgotten that one who knows nothing of the way to make a marriage great and beautiful with one partner is unlikely to succeed with another.

For many young men, family is regarded as no better than a jail, a restriction on their freedom rather than the source of freedom itself, and for the restricted and fenced, man’s instinct is ever to escape. Yet even a child might understand that a marriage requires somerational forbearance and self-control, and it is quite intelligible that there may be cases in which a little outside pressure of social opinion or even actual law may be helpful for the supplementing or reinforcement of the weak self-control of those concerned.

There is little doubt that any social changes which allows for the cheap and continual transfer of affections from one object to another will be disastrous both to the character and happiness of a population. It is for this reason that the beautiful sense for love in the hearts of the young should be encouraged. They should have access to the knowledge of how to cultivate it, instead of being diverted by the clamour for the “freedom” to destroy it.

There are millions of people today who never could happily marry, however favourable the conditions might be, simply because their natures do not contain in sufficient strength the elements required for loving surrender to another. Yet one cannot be ennobled except through these very affections.

So long as the human heart remains what it is, natural tragedies will sometimes arise. A person can no more promise to love or not to love than he can promise to live long. What he can promise is to take good care of his life and his love.

Love is doubtless the last and most difficult lesson that humanity has to learn, but in a sense it underlies all the others.

How To Set Up Chairs For Things

This is a sample chapter from the book Misha Glouberman and I wrote together, called The Chairs Are Where the People Go, which will be published by Faber in July 2011.

There’s a kind of thoughtlessness to how people think about their audience that’s reflected in how they set up chairs. You can see that thoughtlessness immediately. An example will be: There’s a reading in a large room, and what they do is they have a few tables spaced out far from each other near the front of the stage with chairs arranged around them, then behind them they have a couple of rows of chairs, theatre-style, then behind that there’s space for people to stand.

Now, this is terrible, and what it reflects is the degree to which they haven’t thought about their audience. I really feel I have to keep saying this: The chairs are where the people go!

Here’s what you’ve done when you’ve set things up like that: By putting those tables and chairs spaced out in front of the stage, you’ve wasted all the space that’s close to the stage, so you’ve ensured that the vast majority of the people at the show will be far from the stage. Why do you want that? Everything is better when you’re closer to the stage! If you ask people at Trampoline Hall how the show was, you can draw a pretty direct correlation between how much people liked the show and how close they sat to the stage.

Leaving space for people to stand in the back – for a reading! – seems to me ridiculous. Who wants to stand through a reading? You’re pretty much almost intentionally designing things so that a lot of people will find the reading boring – because it’s hard not to be bored when you’re watching something from far away and you’re standing. Those people at the back will talk to each other. So not only will they have a bad time, but their bad time will make it worse for everyone else.

You have to think about where you put your chairs. You have to think about your audience. For some events, it’s good to have few, if any, chairs. At a cocktail party, you want people to mingle, and if you put down a lot of chairs, people won’t move around at all. For a show – if it’s music or something that people can talk through – the same thing applies. It’s great to have people standing, and for music standing is fun because you can dance or talk or move around. At a rock show, that’s not a problem.

For a play, it’s okay to put people fairly close together and on raked seating so they can see the stage. It’s okay to have them be in the dark because they don’t need to see each other and the performers don’t need to see them. For a show where the audience’s interaction with the performers or with each other is important, it has to be different. As always, you want as many people as possible as close to the stage as possible. You can pack people in tighter than you might think, and they won’t mind. If people are drinking, you can scatter a few tables around where they can put their drinks, but you don’t need as many as you might think, because every table takes up space where someone might be sitting. You also want to make sure that there’s some light on the audience, and if you can, it’s great to set things up so the audience can see each other a bit. If you can get them into a quarter-circle around an area that extends from the stage, then the people in the audience can see that they’re not alone watching the show.

Setting up chairs takes a lot of time, but anybody can do it. If you’re running a project and you want to get people involved, ask them to set up chairs. People like to set up chairs, and it’s easy work to delegate. It’s even easier to get people to help put chairs away.

At a conference, if you want a discussion groups to happen, you can set up chairs in a circle, and you don’t need a table.

If you’re going to brunch with your friends, it’s better to sit in a circle or something like a circle than to sit at a long table, because then everyone can talk to each other. I hate when you have to sit at a long table, because it means you have to talk to the same five people throughout the whole meal.

Everyone should know these things.

There is No Time in Waterloo

This piece was commissioned by McSweeney's and printed in Issue 32, a speculative issue with fiction about life in 2010. It was reprinted in the anthology, Darwin's Bastards. The version below is slightly different from the two published version (which also differ from each other, slightly.) This piece was conceived with Margaux Williamson. With special thanks to physicists Sean Gryb, Aaron Berndsen, Lee Smolin and Julian Barbour.

Everyone in Waterloo was an amateur physicist, and they endlessly bugged the real physicists as the physicists sat in cafés talking to each other. The amateurs would approach and put questions to them; simple questions, obvious ones. Or else they asked questions that even a physicist couldn’t answer, or questions that weren’t in the realm of physics at all, but had more to do with biology or straight computation. People who know almost nothing about what they’re talking about are often more enthusiastic than the ones who know a lot, so they do all the talking, while the ones who know their shit stay silent and get red in the face.

Whenever a real physicist would start to correct or explain a point, the amateur would smile and nod, and would loudly proclaim that they’d read something about that in a magazine or book recently. Then they would start explaining it and the physicist would listen, tight-lipped, or else abruptly put an end to the conversation, in frustration.

Then the physicist would return to the Perimeter Institute, which was built on the top of a gently sloping hill, and sigh in relief to be home again, standing at the chalkboard, working out equations.

///

One afternoon in March, a rumour went around town that some boy’s Mothers had predicted that a kid was going to blow up the mall on the left side of town, so all the teenagers got on their scooters and sped off towards the parking lot there.

As Sunni was leaving her apartment, her mother called out from her usual place on the couch and asked where she was going. Sunni returned and explained about the rumour, saying that she was really eager to see the mall be blown up; that she and her friends had so much pent-up energy—they were wild with energy and simply couldn’t wait.

Sunni reluctantly went back and explained about the rumour, admitting that she was really eager to see the mall be blown up; that she and friends had so much pent-up energy – were wild with energy – and simply couldn’t wait.

Sunni’s mother felt a bit of regret that she was going to watch the mall be exploded, but didn’t object; after all, if that was Sunni’s destiny, who was she to interfere?

She replied, “I guess if some boy’s Mothers is saying that one of you is going to blow up the mall, then one of you is going to blow up the mall.”

Then Sunni became emotional and started to cry. She said to her mother, “Please look for a job!” Her mother had lost her position as a law professor after the City shut down all the University departments that weren’t considered excellent enough. The Perimeter Institute had elevated Waterloo’s intellectual pride, and the City wanted to be as excellent in every field as it was in physics, or else not engage in that field at all.

Now her mother replied softly, as she had many times before, that her Mothers said she should not look for a job. At this Sunni cried harder and got out, “Don’t you know that whenever a Mothers say not to look for a job but just to stay on the couch, it means you’re going to die?”

Her mother had been on the couch for a year and a half. Of course she knew, but she just shrugged and looked down at her Mothers and flipped it about in her hand. Maybe it really was that there were no jobs out there. Or maybe she was going to die. She told Sunni that she had no choice but to listen to her Mothers. Sunni said she understood, admitting she did not know her mother’s destiny. Then she left the apartment and went downstairs and got on her orange scooter and zoomed off.

///

At the mall the teenagers spoke excitedly with each other, drawing together and apart, eager for the show to begin. They asked around to discover whose Mothers had predicted the explosion, but no one seemed to know. When after an hour the mall still remained standing, undisturbed, they started checking their Mothers to see if they were the one destined to blow it up. It appeared that none of them were.

Now they began to grow tense and upset. It was not the first time something like this had happened. A week before, some boy’s Mothers had predicted a fight, but no one had thrown the first punch. A month ago, there was supposed to have been an orgy in back of the other mall, the nice one, but after standing around awhile they had checked their Mothers and learned that the probability of their participating in an orgy was really low.

It started to rain, as a weatherman had predicted. Dispirited, the teenagers began to drift off. Only Sunni and a few of her friends remained, to finish the conversation they’d been having about film. They each had their own distinct opinions about art, but came together in agreement that surprise in drama was an inaccurate reflection of life; the best stories followed the path of greatest likelihood. Indeed, when you thought about the best stories down through time, their greatness and terror came from the fact that the most predictable and probable thing always occurred.

“Like in Oedipus,” Sunni said, watching her friend as he lit up his cigarette with an old-fashioned butane lighter whose flame danced high in the air. As the boy tried to snap it closed smoothly, a fumbling occurred, and it tumbled, aflame, onto Sunni’s hand and her Mothers, igniting the casing in a sudden burst.

“Oh, fuck!” Sunni cried, batting her Mothers into the air, which arced, smoking, and dropped on the pavement, the lighter clattering beside it.

“Oh my God, Sunni—is your Mothers dead?” Danny gasped.

“Nope! Nope! Luckily no!” Sunni replied, picking it up. It was burning hot, and she tossed it from hand to hand. Looking down as it cooled, she saw that the screen had been melted into a squinty little eye. The keys were matted down to their wires, and the casing was tarry and charred.

“Still works!” Sunni announced. Then she got onto her scooter, feeling like she was about to faint, and rode to the parking lot around the other side of the mall, her Mothers propped behind the windshield. She kept glancing at it, but no glance transformed it from the twisted, charry mess it had been in the glance before.

In the back parking lot, she stopped her scooter and got off and doubled over, hyperventilating a bit, then ran a distance to throw up. This vomiting might have been because she was pregnant. Most of her friends were; they knew that there was a greater probability of having a successful career and a nice-looking body if they gave birth while still young, and their Mothers pushed them in this direction.

When Sunni returned at last to her Mothers and saw it there on the windshield, she was overtaken by a spell of vertigo. It wasn’t clear yet whether its destruction was the worst, most tragic thing that had ever happened to her, or if this was the most exciting moment of her life. She only knew that she had never felt such dizziness before, and upon asking herself what to do now, then glancing down reflexively at her Mothers for the answer, she grew overwhelmed by vertigo once more.

///

Twenty years earlier, the citizens of Waterloo had grown enthralled by a book written by a physicist who had been invited to spend some time Perimeter. The book was called The End of Time, and its author had argued in a persuasive and beautiful way that time did not exist; the universe was static. There were a slightly less than an infinite number of possible moments hanging about, like paintings in an attic, all real but out of reach, and each person’s destiny was nothing more and nothing less than the most probable of these possible futures.

The people most taken with this idea led fervent discussions on how to best realise the theory in one’s life. Like humans anywhere, they didn’t want to waste their time. They hoped to reach their destinies as quickly and efficiently as possible—not their ultimate destinies, just their penultimate ones. And so it made sense to try and act as much in accordance with probability as they could.

The executives at the BlackBerry headquarters in Waterloo decided they would capitalize on this desire, and they began producing a machine they tagged The Mother of All BlackBerrys. It remained a phone you could email from, but it had an added, special feature: given ongoing inputs, it was calibrated to determine for each user what they were destined to do next.

“It will be a device that determines a person’s most likely next action based on previous behaviours. If the input is one’s life, then the outcome is one’s life,” an executive explained to the rest as they sat around a table.

“Brilliant!” said another executive, reaching for a Danish. And they all reached for Danishes, and toasted each other, smiling.

///

The Mothers—as people began calling them—were at once a huge success. They eclipsed everything in culture at that moment, like any great fad down through time. People in Waterloo consulted their Mothers at every turn, and it quickly became as impossible to live without a Mothers as it had once been to not check email. People wondered how they had managed their lives before the Mothers. They even bought Mothers for their babies.

If life became somewhat more predictable as a result, it was also more comforting, and soon the citizens of Waterloo didn’t even notice that they were going in circles; that it was always the same thing over and over again.

The physicists, though nominally to blame for the proliferation of the Mothers, were largely skeptical and had a hundred doubts, so it was not unusual to be standing in a supermarket line-up and hear one of them testily provoke and challenge an amateur physicist who was checking his Mothers, if the physicist was having a particularly bad day. “So, do these Mothers calculate quantum or classical probabilities?” the physicist might ask; a question over which the amateur might stumble, only to regain his footing upon consulting his Mothers about whether continuing the conversation would be to his benefit, to which the Mothers would reply that the probability was low.

///

What will Sunni do without her Mothers? I sometimes ask myself a similar question. What would I do if I didn’t know what was to come? If the inputs of my past were to disappear, I’d have no idea how I behaved in relationships past, and would not know how to behave in them now. I would play it all differently, not knowing how I was likely to behave. I might forget how much I once hated to be on a soccer pitch, but was forced onto the field, and avoided soccer ever since. I might, while lounging in a park, say to the soccer players, while rising, Do you need an extra player?

///

If you draw a line across a piece of paper, that is King Street. Now draw a small, perpendicular line crossing King Street near the centre. That is Princess Street. That is the part of town where losers, misfits, and orphans hang out. It’s where someone crosses the street drunk, and someone else crosses the street with ripped jeans and a lazy eye.

On either end of King Street, draw a square. These are the two malls. The mall at the right end of town is in the richer neighbourhood, near the Perimeter Institute, the University, and the Institute for Quantum Computing—all those institutions representing the heights of Waterloo’s excellence. The other mall, the one the teenagers gathered at, is situated near the Old Town Hospital, City Hall, and the more run-down establishments that deal with humanities and the human body.

Now watch Sunni speed along the long line of King Street, arriving within minutes at Princess.

///

Sunni was like all her friends and all her friends were like Sunni. Their machines represented the part of the brain that sees patterns and nothing but patterns. To that part of the brain, everything fits. There is no randomness to life, no chance. If ever their Mothers missed something, or something not predicted occurred, it would correct for the future, learning from what had happened and fitting this new thing into a better, more complete image of the whole. In this way, if not everything was already accounted for, Sunni and her friends had faith that in time it would be.

Sunni had always avoided Princess Street, since only losers hung out there. But since nearly every teenager whose Mothers broke wound up on Princess, it was where she decided to go now. She still had the instincts of someone with a Mothers, and wanted to waste no time before moving on to the likeliest next stage of her destiny. She parked her scooter and walked straight into one of the bars, pushing its red door open.

Two teenagers she had never seen before were sitting on tall stools, smoking and drinking, and upon entering Sunni could hear them whisper: Doesn’t she look like Shelly? No, but she reminds me a lot of my grade-four gym teacher. Actually, today in its entirety reminds me a lot of grade four.

Sunni went to perch on the stool beside them and said hi, placing her hand below her slightly heavy belly. They regarded her blankly. Without waiting for a sign of their interest, she explained that she had lost her Mothers that day.

The boy nodded solemnly. Once your Mothers is dead, he knew, it’s gone for good. The factory had shut down years before due to a lack of demand for the Mothers beyond Waterloo, and not a single repair shop in town knew how to fix the machines. The boy explained that the very same thing had happened to him four years ago, but told Sunni not to worry; life would not be as different as she feared. Having said this, he turned to face his friend, finishing up the anecdote he had been telling about his childhood, concluding, “And I still feel its reverberations today.” Then the two of them put down their money and began packing their bags to leave.

“Wait! Wait! Where are you going?” Sunni cried anxiously, and the boy sighed deeply and said, “Relax. Personality is as static as time; it’s a fixed law. People don’t change. As long as you remember that, you’ll be all right. Now we have to go and write in our diaries.” And they left.

Sunni, still sitting there, glanced down at her Elders pin as it began to blink and beep. Then she jumped up from the stool and left

///

Time is a measurement of change. The change in the position of quantum particles cannot always be known, because they don’t seem to exist in any fixed spot. At the level of human bodies, we can see that time has passed because one moment I’m here at this bar, the next I’m at City Hall. But at the quantum level, everything is cloudy. This is the mechanism for the disappearance of time. The people of Waterloo liked the timeless theory because, deep down, they felt it. Their lives, in so many ways, reflected it. The science simply stamped their intuition with the air of authority and truth.

///

“No,” said a physicist, standing in the park under the gazebo, to the twenty-odd citizens picnicking around her. “We don’t all believe that time is static.”

The picnickers smiled up at the physicist. They continued to eat their bread and sandwiches and throw their strawberries into the grass.

///

Though Sunni left for City Hall as soon as she received the call, she arrived a little later than everyone else. The other Elders were already there, waiting for the emergency meting to begin.

The teenagers of Waterloo, whose Mothers had been receiving inputs since the day they were born, were believed by everyone to have a more accurate grasp of what the future would hold. Compared to their Mothers, their parents’ Mothers were deeply lacking: twenty, thirty years unaccounted for. So a special place in Waterloo was reserved for the young. They were given much respect. They bore the official title Double Special Elders, since having a particular destiny is the essence of being Special. They were paraded about on ceremonial occasions and called in to advise the city on all the important matters.

Sunni crept quietly through the side door, up to her seat in the fourth row of the dais, which seated thirty across. Already Waterloo’s two hundred and fifty native-born teens were in their seats, and they glanced at Sunni and watched her take her place, though she had tried to make her entrance subtle. The mayor, standing at the podium before them, was in the midst of explaining the current crisis, but after two minutes, Sunni was still totally lost, so she whispered to the boy beside her, asking him what she had missed.

He replied quickly, “This morning Perimeter received word from Africa that all the problems in physics have been solved.”

“What?” she whispered back. “Are you sure? The measurement problem and—”

“Yes, yes, everything,” he insisted hotly. Then he rolled his eyes. “Don’t ask me.”

Sunni slumped back in her chair, stunned. The mayor was now on to the mundane, municipal details, explaining how much it cost the city to fund the institute, claiming that it would be humiliating for Waterloo to carry on the project of physics when the field was now kaput. He gestured at the two physicists who had come to explain the proof, should anyone want to hear it. He said that they represented the physicists who believed the institute should be kept alive—not because the African proof was wrong; it wasn’t—but for reasons that he, the mayor, did not completely understand, though if one of the Elders wanted to hear their reasoning, the physicists could give it. As for the rest of the physicists, they were too preoccupied with going over the proof to attend the meeting that day.

“Would any of the Elders like to see the African proof?” the mayor asked.

Sunni looked around tentatively. No one else seemed to want to hear it, but she wanted to know, so she awkwardly raised her hand. The mayor nodded at the physicists, and the younger of them stood and went to the whiteboard and began drawing an equation and a little diagram. He turned to the Elders and began to speak. He was only a few sentences into his elucidation when the mayor interrupted him to exclaim:

“Aha—look! It’s like an earthworm praying!”

At which point the young physicist violently threw his marker onto the ground and left the whiteboard and sat down beside his friend. He was too upset by the events of the day to push forward. It wasn’t even so awful that a proof had been found; the pain in his heart was about how unsatisfying a proof it was. It just wasn’t the beautiful, elegant thing that everyone had been hoping for.

Sunni wanted to ask the physicists what the African proof said about the unreality of time, but just as she was about to raise her hand again, the boy next to her leaned over and pointed at Sunni’s Mothers, which she still reflexively clasped tightly in the palm of her hand.

“Is your Mothers dead?” he gasped.

Sunni, hiding it quickly beneath her sweater, replied with feigned ease, “Nah, it’s just a new sleeve. My architect friend made it. He’s cool.”

“I wouldn’t want a sleeve that looked like that.”

“Never mind.”

“You should take that sleeve off.”

“One day I will.”

Then the mayor turned to the teenagers and asked, “Should Perimeter be closed?” In this way voting began.

The first Elder spoke: “Yes.”

The second Elder looked up from her Mothers, which knew that once you began talking about ending something, usually that thing ends. “Yes!”

The third Elder spoke. “Yes.”

And on and on it went: yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.

Now it was Sunni’s turn. She hesitated, glancing down at the blank screen of her Mothers, which she had pulled out again. It was still a twisted, black, charry mess. She took a deep breath, and said very quietly, though loud enough for everyone to hear:

“I am no longer Special.”

Then she stood up from her place on the dais and climbed carefully down the steps. It was a humiliating walk, one others had performed before her while she had watched in pity and fear. Behind her there rose a wall of whispering; it was the world Sunni had been part of, sealing itself off behind her.

She walked past the Mayor and beyond the physicists, towards the doors at the end of the hall. Just before she slipped out, she heard the mayor announce the tally of the vote: it was unanimous. Perimeter was to be shut down within the hour.

“Fucking teenagers,” the older physicist muttered.

///

Sunni stepped out into the breezy air of the afternoon, blinking in the brightness of the day. Her face felt oddly hot. She stood on the steps of City Hall, faintly bewildered. Her eyes rested on a tree that stood a short distance in the grass, and she watched it gently sway, moved by the breeze. What would move her, now that her Mothers was dead? With each day, she felt, her destiny would be less and less clear, and less and less would what was probable be the law that ran her life. She tried to imagine what other law might come to replace it, but no other laws came to mind.

Perhaps, she mused, she could learn about living from this tree—let the laws that moved it move her as well. At base, she knew, she was made up of the very same substance as the tree; she must be, in some sense, treelike. She stepped down onto the lawn.

At that moment, her attention was distracted by some vague sounds in the distance. She squinted. Son she could discern a lethargic parade approaching from the far end of King Street. After watching a bit longer, she realised what it was: a small tide of physicists was flowing from the doors of Perimeter. They came closer, heaving down King Street with stooped postures, dazed, carrying boxes of computers, papers and chalk, streaming towards their cars, which would take them back to the university towns from which they had come.

“How pathetic,” came a small voice.

Sunni turned around and noticed that sitting cross-legged beneath the tree was a scrawny boy around her own age. From the first glance she could tell that he was a loser, but such a loser he wasn’t even a Princess Street loser.

“They don’t have to leave,” he said.

“But it’s their destiny.” Sunni replied, moving closer. “I was in the meeting. I saw it happen.”

The boy looked up at her sceptically, pushing his bangs away. “Destiny? What a word! These physicists don’t believe in the future. Most of them don’t, anyway. I know it. I’m good friends with some of them.”

“But—” Sunni shook her head. “If there’s no destiny, how can you know what’s going to happen next?”

The boy, whose name was Raffi, frowned. He paused a moment, then went on to quietly explain, barely raising his voice above a whisper, so that Sunni had to move closer to hear.

He told her that last year’s Bora Bora proof, which contributed to the African proof, revealed that not everything that comes to pass can be known in advance; rather everything is in a continuous state of co-creation and co-evolution with everything else. The future is utterly non-computable and non-predictable – possibly not mathematical, in essence, at all. No future can exist until it exists, since we are all creating reality together in a radically flexible present. “Like, things can happen all sorts of different ways,” he said.

Sunni sat back hard against the tree. She was flustered by all that this boy was saying. But the Bora Bora proof was impossible! Absurd! She turned her head as the Double Special Elders began emerging from the tall doors of City Hall and spreading across the lawn, heads bent low over their Mothers as they decided where to go next. She was about to say something when, in the distance, a blue spiral burst into the world, lighting up the sky. Sunni felt like she was going to vomit, felt like her insides had been scooped out with a spoon. 

“It’s the action,” Raffi said quietly. “It’s coming closer, I see.”

“What action?” Sunni asked.

Raffi said slowly, looking at her again, “You’re a Double Special Elder through and through. You didn’t even know.”

Now another explosion burst blue in the distance, near the mall on the left side of town. A high-pitched radial whistle was emanating from the spiral, and Raffi got up like a smooth animal. He bent over and started rummaging in the large duffel bag that had been lying beside him in the grass.

Sunni pushed herself closer to the tree, scared. In the distance, a physicist in a red overcoat turned around and began walking towards them. Raffi looked up to answer the question on Sunni’s face and said, “It’s a Spiral. We might know how to handle this.” The physicist came near and Raffi walked off with her, in the direction of Perimeter and through its front doors.

Now Sunni was alone. She found herself, for the time, watching the Elders, many of whom were gazing into the distance where the spiral still hung. Sunni observed them glance down at their Mothers to make sense of it; to know how to respond. But their Mothers had no valuable insight; could not fit the spiral into the pattern; had never known such a thing before.

Get on your scooter and go home, was the instruction that appeared on their screens; an instruction applicable to many situations, and the most common one.

The teenagers made their way to their scooters, seemingly sure in their movements, for somewhere inside they felt a reassurance: it was not that their Mothers lacked insight about this new thing, but that the question they had posed to their Mothers about the explosion was not a pertinent one. What happened in the distance had nothing to do with the patterns in their lives. It had nothing to do with all the ways they were Special.

They got on their wheels and, like the physicists, sped off from the heart of town.

Sunni looked up as an acorn fell from the tree and landed on her head. She thought about what she knew.