Stephen Graham Jones - Do (this).pdf - Stephen Graham Jones - widez2

do(this)

by Stephen Graham Jones

Stephen Graham Jones’s most recent novel is Demon Theory . His next will

be Ledfeather . Other books include The Fast Red Road , The Bird Is Gone

, All the Beautiful Sinners , and Bleed Into Me . Over eighty of his short

stories have been sold to publications that range from Literal Latté to

Cemetery Dance . His new tale about more than one obsession is his first

for Asimov’s .

* * * *

Leo’s dad started talking about it over dinner, just thinking out loud like he

did. It was something he’d heard at work. Leo stabbed his mashed

potatoes with his fork and endured. He even made it a game: if he could

get the next bite down before his dad interrupted himself again, that was a

point, and when he had enough points then his plate would be clean and he

could get back to his room for the night.

But then his dad, his thoughts were just stumbling all over

themselves, each one branching off the middle of the last one, so that

instead of a straight line of reasoning like Leo could have appreciated, it

was just a jumbled snowball of conjecture. There was nothing elegant about

it. More than that, it was precisely this kind of second grade, innocent

exuberance that always embarrassed Leo about his dad. It was easier just

to stay in his room.

As for Leo’s mom, the few glances he cut her way, she was stabbing

her potatoes as well. Or shaping them, maybe, making a kind of waterfall

for the gravy cupped at the top of the volcano.

Had his dad noticed, taken the time to look from plate to plate, his

verbal chalkboard session probably would have started him down a whole

different track: inherited behaviors, convergent evolution, and on and on

until the snowball rolled into some big avalanche that buried them all, only to

be found next week, maybe, when work or school came knocking.

There was no chance of that, though.

Not the avalanche, but his dad noticing anything as mundane as his

wife or son.

What he’d heard at work, at the Tank as he called it—he’d even

bought a special tin lunch box, like thinking was supposed to be a real

job—was a riddle of sorts. A simple enough question, if you dropped it in

any normal cafeteria, but at the Tank they specialized in making the simple

complicated, the potentially useful just wholly impractical.

The only reason Leo was even paying half-attention, really, was that it

had a bit to do with his advanced study question for the month—Did

language precede thought, or did thought precede language? The

chicken/egg shuffle. And he’d been GT long enough to know that he wasn’t

really supposed to come up with a right answer. It was more about “honing

his reasoning capabilities,” “asking penetrating questions,” “probing the

world with his mind.”

Like they thought he was in training to be his dad or something.

Yeah.

The guy who’d had the same bite of potatoes on his fork now for

maybe four minutes, and wouldn’t even notice they were cold when he

finally put them in his mouth.

The riddle he was still thrilled with—for the moment, anyway—had to

do with classification. Not genus and species and kingdom, nothing Latin or

Linnaean, but more about distinguishing characteristics: if there were only

one thing that could be said to separate the man-animal from all the “other”

animals (his quotes), what might that be?

It was this kind of stuff that Leo’s dad packed his lunch each morning

for.

Leo huffed some accidental air out his nose. Instead of laughing.

His dad finally put his potatoes in his mouth. They may as well have

been crushed ants. “And...?” he said, motioning with his fork for Leo to take

a stab.

Leo put another glob of potatoes in his mouth instead.

His dad nodded, already focusing all the way through Leo, and

dropped into an explanation about how it wasn’t anything biological, of

course, that went without saying, and it couldn’t be as easy as

consciousness either, as that was, for now anyway, impossible to test for,

and it couldn’t really be language either, as prairie dogs had vocabulary,

birds had syntax, primates could be taught to sign, and then there was

chemical language, pheromones and all that, to say nothing of the flashing

certain octopuses, octo pi , engaged in to communicate—

Except ... what if there were a way to test for consciousness through

language, right?

Leo forked another bite in. His dad was rolling, out of control.

“Yeah, yeah ... then it’s just a matter of—of finding something peculiar

to human communication that’s not in any of the other language systems,

not in whale song, not in beaver tails, not in bee dances ... something—art.

Writing. Poetry. Yes. Poetry is specifically human. Take poetry. We ... we

classify it as a leisure activity, supposing—supposing that the reason

dolphins don’t speak in verse is that verse has no practical use like

extensions of their other forms of play might ... spinning, jumping, it’s all

exercise, practice for hunting or a mating ritual or whatever, but poetry’s just

leisure—or, or, I mean, it could have to do with spare time too, right? I

mean, they have a complex society but no civilization, no specialization that

would really allow for the downtime necessary for leisure activities, for

entertainment, for anything so idle, that’s not directly related to survival. Like

we’re beyond that, I know, I know, not just redefining ‘survival,’ but that’s not

the real question. The real question is what’s local only to poetry?”

It was another question for the gallery. For the prisoners.

“Let me compare thee to a summer day...” Leo’s mom intoned, as if

she couldn’t help herself, and Leo winced, because one thing his dad didn’t

ever need in these kinds of conversations was somebody else packing

their own clever handfuls of snow on.

But it was too late.

Leo looked up into his dad’s blank eyes.

“Exactly!” he said, gravy there at the corner of his lip. “That’s it. And

what is poetry if not—if not stretching a functionally limited vocabulary, a

limited set, to do things beyond its original parameters? This is ... yes. Do

you see what this is?”

Leo wasn’t sure who the question was for. But his plate was clean.

“Metaphor,” his dad whispered then, standing over the table as a form

of emphasis, then whispering reverently. “Humans are the only animals we

know of that use metaphor, that don’t describe things as they are, but—it’s

because we’re explorers, don’t you see? Because we’re adaptable to

different environments. We always have pioneers looking over the next

mountain, then coming back with tales of—whatever, dragons, castles,

automobiles, moons—that have to be explained in terms the rest of the

population doesn’t ... terms that don’t exist , I mean. See? So you say this is

like that, kind of. Yes. Instead of ever admitting something’s indescribable,

we push our words instead, rearrange them to—to compound and extend

meaning. Do rabbits use metaphor to describe their carrots, you think?”

“In cartoons, you mean?” Leo said, his plate so ready to deliver to the

sink.

“No,” his dad said, confusion there in his eyes, “ real ones, man.”

Leo pursed his lips in what felt like pity, shook his head no, he didn’t

think real rabbits used metaphor that much in the wild, and then he was

gone like always, ghosting through the kitchen to the stairs, the solace of

his room.

“Carrots are carrots,” he mumbled to himself, checking again to make

sure his door was locked.

It was a true statement, one that he knew he could write a line of code

for: if($p = “orange”) && if($p(!(“basketball”)) then more than likely $p would

be a carrot. Provided he strung the conditionals out to account for every

non-carrot orange thing. And there were probably classes he could use,

even, if he wanted, a series of waterfalls to quit the function from cycling

through each non-carrot: edible/non-edible, vegetable/mineral,

terrestrial/Martian, “basketball-ish,” etc., like a penny falling through a series

of slots in a change sorter.

And it might even be fun that way.

Except right now he had to get his GT paper ready. It was the fourth

one for the month, and, thankfully, the last of the “Language” cycle.

The first week had been hidden codes, semiotics and stuff, which, in

spite of how inapplicable it seemed, had made Leo feel more rather than

less vulnerable to advertisements, and then it had been finding instances of

performative speech, like promises or when a preacher marries two

people, stupid stuff that both described and did a thing at the same time,

except Leo had gotten extra credit for writing a paper his dad would have

been proud of if he’d ever seen it. Its thesis was that programming, writing

code, was the purest instance possible of so-called “performative”

language. The words there weren’t even called words, but “functions,” but it

still counted as language because there was vocabulary, there was syntax,

there was communication, albeit between him and whatever system he was

on.

But now there was this chicken/egg game.

Leo rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.

Beside the rig he was on now was his machine from last semester,

before the rebuild. He still had it ported in just for data, but except for the

drive it was scrap, just a skeleton. And maybe that would be a good enough

answer for GT: not the chicken or the egg, but the chicken stripped down to

its “eggness” somehow.

But that was what his dad was trying to do downstairs.

And Leo wasn’t his dad.

He opened a terminal window, just to think.

All day, he’d been pretty sure his thesis was going to be that neither

came first, really, that they had to have happened at the exact same time,

language was thought, thought was language. Except now his dad had

polluted him.

Now what he was wondering was if code, which he valued above all

other language, mostly because it allowed him to talk to sane, reasonable

servers and engines and modules instead of insane people like he’d just

had to endure, what he wondered was if there was any metaphor in code?

Any figurative language? Not necessarily whimsical or poetic or anything

stupid like that, but something descriptive like his dad was saying, some

nested bit of syntax that really pushed the language ... some last-ditch

workaround he’d had to come up with at one time or another which could,

for the purposes of his paper at least, be called metaphor. And it would be

something elegant, of course, one of those magic moments where he

realized that this second statement, when recursing, and tricked into a false

positive, could tweak the initial statement in such a way that the bracketing

function could be made to do something halfway opposite from what it had

been intended, a kind of halfway opposite that was also a shortcut. And not

some pages-long line that you had to hold your breath to follow, either, but

something simple, that Leo could prove a point with.

If he were going to prove a point, though—this was GT after all—he

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