This Blue Ball | Page 6

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him along the asphalt stream, rolling first left then right, as it showed the car from various angles: a bathetic, outdated, fume-spewing wreck, with film-covered window panes and bald tires and a bad shimmy on the rear right wheel.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 out of nowhere among his childish preoccupations. That is where the prejudices and mental shortcuts that we espouse come in handy: you know, almost immediately, where someone is coming from and you react accordingly. An agile mind with no strong affiliations is unsettling by comparison.
Andrew was both the easy