This Blue Ball | Page 6

Indo-European ideal balance of cheeks, ears, forehead
and chin.
She was slow to move, and slow to engage. While waiting for a reaction on her part, your
attention might hold on the cosmetic aids to her person: foundation, eye shadow, lipstick,
blush, even a fair amount of perfume. All this does not make an unpleasant impression, at
least if you're free of allergic reaction, but this apparent preoccupation with externalities
was a marked contrast with the calm and self-absorption she otherwise projected. It could
be, you might think, that she had not broken psychologically with her parents and hence
not with the Liz Claiborne style of her mother - or maybe, at this point, of her
grandmother. Or it could be that she was vain in a way that her quietude didn't let you see.
Or it could be, as I believe, that she was both fascinated by and fearful of the immense
world, in a way that she did not allow herself to explore. The ritualistic decoration and
scenting were a form of homage to this world, a gesture that compensated but did not put
her out into the middle of things, at risk.
No. 5 - Gary worked quite a ways from the church where he met Alice, and he had no
choice but to navigate an Interstate to drive to her home. We, meanwhile, might imagine
a camera on a miniature helicopter chasing him along the asphalt stream, rolling first left
then right, as it showed the car from various angles: a bathetic, outdated, fume-spewing
wreck, with film-covered window panes and bald tires and a bad shimmy on the rear right
wheel. He believed himself alone on this quest, accompanied only in chance
configuration by a wave of individuals, each alone.
No one moving through this network of purposes is alone. Imagine electromagnetic
snooping equipment strategically placed throughout this corner of the world -- perhaps on
every corner -- that bounds up and down the EM spectrum, picking up pieces of data all
along the way, and that feeds this flood of commingled data across a broad fiber optic
pipe to a supercharged computer or two, and that they sort and concatenate and realign
and decrypt and interpret, until voices and data reemerge. Another computer jumps up
and down these streams and picks out a word here, a bit of data there. If Gary were to say
the word "bomb" into his digital phone -- which he deemed to be encrypted and safe -- or
if he were to send the characters C4 in an encrypted email, these real- time marvels might
have tried and convicted him before he had even hung up, before he had even quit his
application.
All information, all the time: the opportunity and the curse of the digital age. Gary is both
visible and transparent, a cipher for something at once predictable and unknown. At this
time, his actions are pure "citizen-tolerable" -- beneath a threshold for which citizens
should be apprehended and taught a penal lesson -- and insofar he is invisible.
But imagine that you could shift the information lens ten hours, ten days, ten months, 10
years into his alien-friendly future -- if you are responsible for understanding and

maintaining order, you might evaluate the options differently. You might, for instance,
feel the need to declare this an in-the-field emergency and put that highflying drone into
interdiction mode and authorize the firing of a supersonic missile -- kaboom! -- into his
blue heap right here, before he reaches city blocks where collateral damage would be
greater. Or you might conjure up a US felony warrant, to be served that very evening, on
a dangerous, mentally unstable and heavily armed criminal. Or schedule a single- car
accident for that night. Or do you believe you would choose to ignore the intelligence,
watch with resignation as he bounded up the freeway, like any citizen drone on an
incomprehensible mission? -- It is a calculus of faith, that though each mission bears
scant results enough of them are the positive side of the social equation, an equation that
is unsolvable, for which even the computational approximation would take your lifetime.
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Gary parked across from the condominium building and tried to summon up the good
sense that he would need. He remembered many evenings there, talking sensibly with
Alice and humoring Andrew, one of those prodigal children who grow up too quickly for
your, or their own, good. Andrew was more than able to have an intelligent conversation
with his mother -- more so, even, than Gary or the average Joe she would bring home,
even if, at the same time, he had no context for his opinions. There would be a long pause
whenever he expressed one of his adult opinions, seemingly