Over coffee, my sister is telling me she had erotic dreams during the last trimester of her pregnancy.
“What kind of erotic dreams?”
“Two Olivers.”
“Two… of Oliver, your husband?”
“Yes.”
“You were sleeping with your husband, but there were two of him?”
“Yes.”
“That’s the most faithful erotic dream I’ve ever heard.”
I host a dinner. Six of us around the table. Saul, Albert, Leon, Susannah, Ruth, and me. We eat watermelon with lime and red pepper flakes, gazpacho, bread and butter and salt. Enough wine to tip the conversation into abstraction. A big salad with basil. Sliced peaches.
Saul, a psych resident, has just started a rotation at Kirby on Randalls Island, and everyone wants to hear how it’s going. He’s doing inmate evaluations and tells us many patients have an incentive to try to get to Bellevue, to be deemed insane or unfit for trial. He finds the work challenging and a little harrowing so far. Tells us what the Uber driver said to him when he dropped him at the hospital one morning, when he was picking up bloodwork: “Bon courage!”
As I bring out the last bottle (put in the freezer to chill), Albert tells the table about the show he’s curating – AI-generated images that riff on DNA, 23andMe, family trees. He describes helices and matrices, photos and diagrams rendered by Dall-E, one of the generative bots.
Susannah asks Albert where his relatives are from, then, and he tries to remember out loud in real time.
“I think… Ohio,” he says. “Or Iowa?”
“It’s okay,” says Saul. “I don’t know if my dad works at Intel or IBM, and it’s too late to ask.”
“One of those flyover companies,” says Albert.
“Dad… I hate to ask… what’s your name?” says Leon.
Susannah’s been quiet throughout dinner, and I know it’s because she’s recovering from the egg-freezing retrieval procedure. Hormones rebalancing, her system in flux. Ruth is herself – more so, with Ben out of town. That’s everyone. It’s the first time I’ve hosted in a year, which makes me feel myself again, too.
I work in AI these days as well – a low-level trainer of a Large Language Model. The job’s mostly remote. Once a week, we contractors stream into the tech company’s spacious, sterile complex for in-person deskwork and facetime.
Otherwise, several hours a day, I chat with the bots from home on my couch, or at my desk, or in my bed. I ask them questions and correct their answers – separating what’s dangerous from what’s merely wrong. Harmful error from innocuous misfire. The bots often make me laugh.
Today at our in-office meeting, the higher-ups tell a story.
Once, when a group of engineers was teaching an AI model to play a boat-racing video game, they instructed it to get as many points as possible. The engineers assumed this would involve finishing the race. Instead, the boat found an isolated lagoon where it could turn in a circle, racking up a high score despite catching on fire, crashing into other boats, and going nowhere. Maximizing points, the engineers learned, was a “misspecified reward function.”
This is one of many parables I take with me into the world.
In the past year, there’d been a breakup, a lost job, and a move. Then a second move to fix the first. But at last I’d felt settled enough to host, which Susannah told me was a sign, a signal. She told me to redownload the dating apps, and I promised I’d think about it.
The next week at the office, one engineer keeps comparing bots to people.
“The rate of human learning is just two bits a second,” he says. “Which means most inputs are lost on people. To a computer, our speech – our outputs – would sound slowed-down, the way a whale’s song sounds.”
This same day, I chat with an unknown man who sits down next to me in the cafeteria. He’s notably handsome, and I’ve never seen him before. The man tells me he’s a movie actor, just in for the day. I ask him what he’s doing at the company and he says he’s in the office “to be scanned.” He’s an extra, he tells me, though he prefers the term “background actor.” Then he looks sheepish. The extra says he understands that most actors don’t want to be scanned, because of the implications for the future of the profession.
“I just need the money right now,” he says, heading back to the buffet for a second helping.
That evening, courting possibility, I re-download the apps. One app. I reassess my profile, swipe, match, and message. At last, sufficiently restless and lonely, I agree to go out with a photographer. We decide on a bar near his apartment. After two drinks, I follow him home.
In the morning, the photographer makes me coffee on the stove, plays a vinyl record. The one-bedroom is full of carved objects, prints, books of photography, and an unusual lamp with a fern pressed into its shade. His darkroom’s in a closet with a red light above the door.
The photographer warms milk for our coffee and froths it with a frother on his counter, which is the kind of small luxury I’ve never cultivated.
Distracted, I look through his shelves and take down a copy of Richard Avedon’s “In the American West.” It’s a book of his signature large-format, documentary-style portraits, but of people instead of fashion models. I read Avedon’s introduction, and his prose is as clear and clean as the photos. He describes the “inherent manipulations” of his profession, which “could never take place with impunity in normal life.”
Flipping the book’s heavy pages, I see: oil workers, secretaries, housekeepers, gas station attendants, slaughterhouse workers, miners, drifters. There’s a rodeo publicist paired with a pastor – she in rhinestones, he in that collar. Avedon’s captions are efficient. He gives only his subjects’ occupations, locations, and a date – cursory information, but enough to be evocative. “Pig men,” “Sheep men,” “Hutterites.”
I flip a page and see Avedon’s famous beekeeper – pale, bald, and stoic. Bare-chested, his skin and face covered with fuzzy honeybees. The photographer comes up behind me, then, and tells me how much film Avedon spent on him, how many shots. There are several images of the beekeeper (the word is ‘apiarist,’ I read), and the photographer points out how the bees are in a different location in each image, a slightly different pattern, the care with which Avedon chose which to print.
I ask if a particular image is a “platinum print,” the kind of work the photographer said he makes.
“Well, that’s ink on paper,” the photographer says. He’s half-kidding. It’s a reproduction of what had been a platinum print, yes. The photographer talks about the inherent trouble with looking at photographs in books, then, or on a website. Online in particular, the images are always backlit by the screen.
“The way photographs are meant to be viewed,” he says, “is by having light fall on them.”
The next week, the office day is dedicated to “edge cases” – close calls and near-misses, on the margins. These are the ones that cause long dark nights of the soul in engineers. Like the time a self-driving car killed a human: Although the vehicle was programmed to avoid both cyclists and pedestrians, the car didn’t know what to do when it saw someone walking a bike across the street.
Saturday evening, I go out with a physicist. A postdoc, technically. (The photographer is out of town for some weeks, for a shoot.) We make a plan at a location equidistant from our apartments.
It’s a rooftop, and the temperature of the air is perfectly comfortable. I get the postdoc talking about his work. He’s studying what happens to space-time inside a black hole.
“Take a bathtub,” the postdoc says. “For most purposes, you could think of what’s inside a bathtub as a liquid – that description is enough. But you could think of circumstances under which it’s important to know that the liquid’s made up of molecules and the molecules of particles. Freezing, evaporation.
“For most purposes, our understanding of space-time is sufficient with the ‘liquid’ description,” he goes on. “But my lab is looking for a molecular description, which could help us understand what happens to space-time in a black hole, under an extreme set of pressures.”
I sip my cocktail. Seeing I’m wrapping my head around the bathtub, the postdoc tells me he spends most of his days “playing with toy models of black holes,” which I do find endearing, even though I know he means entering data into a sophisticated computer program.
As we’re finishing our drinks, the physicist becomes melancholy. His research has reached a point of frustration, he tells me. Part of being a good scientist, he says, is knowing how to pick which problems to solve – which means knowing which might be solvable.
August. I housesit for Ruth and Ben while they’re away. Their backyard is all flowers, weeds, mosquitoes, vegetables, herbs, strings of lights, and melted stubs of candles on weather-worn furniture.
The height of their ceilings makes a difference – the books on their shelves, tile in their bathroom, its grime-free grout. Dust-free floors. In the spring, they scattered sunflower seeds in the backyard, and now the stalks are taller than I am, their faces bending and drooping.
Over the two days I house-sit I eat: their ripe tomatoes, leftovers from their fridge, soup from their cans, toast with butter and jam, the last of their arugula with lime and olive oil, salt and pepper, their cheeses (brie, goat) and crackers (seeded), some white wine, a canned iced coffee with oat milk, peppermint tea, oatmeal with nuts and brown sugar and maple syrup, pitted dates, a bagel with cream cheese and lox and dill and red onion and capers from a bougie cafe nearby, coffee from their beans.
I know Ruth and Ben have been trying to have a child, and their backyard and pantry seem so stocked… so full… The word is “fertile.” I recognize this thought is like when one lets the weather dictate one’s mood, and that there’s a name for it: The Pathetic Fallacy.
Now I’m on the ferry back from the office. With me are Hasidic women in long skirts and men in black silk coats, the men’s hats stiff circles of fur. Children everywhere, demanding their mothers’ attention.
I hear one of the women complain to another about the delay, how long she waited before and after running errands. The wasted day, her husband.
“So, what, you took a ferry ride,” the second woman says, having none of it.
Then the first tells the second she prefers the subway, finding her way in the city.
“Without the phone, you find your way?” the second says.
“With the phone, I have a phone,” the first says, apologetic. “For work.”
Their hair is wigs, or the same blunt cut, or covered. I feel free beside them. My beer in a brown paper bag, the air. I think of my sister and her two children already. These women with a half dozen apiece. Double-decker strollers. The kids run everywhere in old-fashioned clothes, holding binoculars. Beneath their black pants, the men wear white tights, leather shoes. They twirl the curls from their temples. One sits across from a young woman, hugely pregnant in a brown and black dress. His wife or sister? Several of the women look pregnant in fact, but she’s the most dazed and beatific.
I get off in Sunset Park alone among them. They walk in groups of six to ten, a throng. All different heights and ages. All dressed alike, out of time.
That evening I get a drink with childhood friend Henry, who works at a flash trading firm. He always pays.
At the end of each year, Henry says, there’s a number that tells you how well you did, and the number is bigger or smaller. He describes the company as “printing paper.” For a long time, the company had Henry working on the trading algorithms and models, he tells me, but now everyone there is smarter than him, and the smartest thing he can do is put the right people to work on the right problems, rather than work on the problems himself.
The photographer is back. At his apartment, he draws us a bath, with bath salts. Candles.
“Okay, Archimedes,” he says before we get in. “Let’s see how we did.”
The next weekend, Ruth and I train to the New York State Wolf Conservation Center. Another IVF round has failed, and I want to distract her.
“What brought you to work here?” Ruth asks our guide, a woman with long gray hair fixed in a complicated braid, twined with a ribbon.
“I’m passionate about human-predator coexistence,” the guide says.
The woman had previously volunteered at the zoo, but she was drawn by the center’s project of reintroducing wolves into the wild. The organization focuses on places where they’ve been hunted to near extinction.
“Wolves have been the subjects of negative propaganda since Europeans first came to the Americas,” the guide says. “Since the Brothers Grimm.”
The creatures are extremely shy, it turns out. The center also cultivates this in them. The shyest wolves will survive when reintroduced, while the friendly ones will get themselves killed – usually by approaching humans with the kind of curiosity attributed to death-bound cats.
When wolves were wiped out as apex predators in Yellowstone, the environment changed so much that the rivers changed course, the guide tells us.
“That was due to the loss of what we call the ‘landscape of fear,’” she says. “When the elk would graze, they used to never graze down to the bud, because the wolves would get them. But without that anxiety – without the wolves –, they ate and ate. That meant fewer trees of the kind the beavers needed to survive the winter and build their dams, which affected the direction the water flows. As the wolves come back, the willow, aspen, and cottonwood stands have begun to recover.”
Ruth and I take in the maned wolf’s stilt-like legs and the silver arctic called Cooper after the news anchor. We learn when each species vocalizes – some howl to attract members of the opposite sex, or so their pups can find them. Others as the moon rises.
“If you really want to hear them, come on the first Monday of each month at 11 am,” the guide says.
“That’s eerily predictable,” I say. “Why that time?”
“It’s when the center tests the fire siren alarm system for three minutes.”
I keep seeing the photographer.
“You’re leaving!?” I say, the next Sunday, when he says he’ll go out to get groceries. We’ve been in bed for hours.
“Don’t say that,” he says, wounded. “I’m like the sun. It leaves, but it always comes back.”
Summer is ending. Susannah says her parents will be away for a week soon, and would I like to come to Florida? Train the bots from the sand? The photographer is off on another shoot. I go.
The second day is bright and clear. We take out the tiny sailboat, all confidence. Early, a coolness in the air. The tide’s going in, the water rushing out to sea, sand rising out of the shallows. On the shoal, we pull the centerboard up. In irons, sails luffing, I get out, the water ankle deep, and pull the boat towards the buoys that indicate deeper water.
Susannah tells me to drag my feet, to cause vibrations to scare the stingrays away. We hit the fiberglass hull with the palms of our hands, causing vibrations that mimic echolocations, to draw the dolphins. Some break the water – tails, fins. The air is still, windless. Water smooth, untroubled.
Then, far out in the water, we catch it. When I go overboard, laughing, and soak my shirt, she takes off her father’s and gives it to me, something dry against my skin (she’d managed to stay in the boat as I tumbled). Warm again, dragging the boat again, I walk invincibly on the sandbar, towards the wind we’ve once again lost. To anyone in the distance, some son of God – out in the ocean, but moving above it. Some saint or martyr, rescuing the skiff. I take in Susannah’s laughing face, her swimsuit, her father’s other open shirt, her eyes the color of the sea.
“Susannah, your eyes are the color of the sea,” I say.
Green-gold, out where we are, in that light. In direct sun, the centers are nearly yellow, cat-like, around the irises.
“Sunflower eyes,” she says, when I describe them.
At certain hours here, the sea looks as though it gives off its own light, the way the moon looks.
Back in the city, work has planned a weekend-long retreat at a local hotel.
“Don’t go,” the photographer says, at the door.
“I won’t be gone long,” I say. “Two nights. Like the sun – I leave, but I always come back.”
“Two nights,” he says. “Can you imagine if I didn’t see the sun for two days and two nights?”
And I discover I’m in the palm of his hand.
Cora Lewis is a writer and reporter whose fiction has appeared in Joyland, The Yale Review, The Cleveland Review of Books, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and currently works at the Associated Press in New York.