WOULD YOU LIKE TO PLAY A GAME?
Stop telling me things. Stop telling me things. I want to tell you things. My husband was named Irving. When he got very old, his hair was thin and his back was curved and he looked like an ape. His mind was right. But his body wasn’t working. After his heart surgery, it wasn’t right. He couldn’t go out of the house because it wasn’t safe. One day, he came to me and asked for his spending money and the keys to his car. He was so frail. He couldn’t drive. He told me that he wanted to get his car cleaned. He loved a car wash; it was special and important to him to have everything just right. I told him that he could get his car washed in the morning because I was hoping he’d forget about it. But he insisted. He was so certain that it must be done. So I asked this young man who lived next door to take the car to get it washed. He was a nice young man, like in the old days, and he did it. When he got back, Irving looked out the window at the car and he said that it was shiny. “Sometimes they cut corners but they did a good job this time,” he said. “It’s nice not to be cheated.” I remember that to this day. Irving kept his keys with him and went to sleep. The next morning we found him with the keys in his hand. He was sitting in the chair, looking out the window into the backyard. I cried and I cried and I cried. I never cheated on him. I tried to be happy with him the best way I knew how. I don’t want my story to be sad. Don’t you see that? Don’t you see that there is more than one way to live a life? Or will history only judge us by what it wants us to be, not by what we are?
ARE YOU STILL THERE? WOULD YOU LIKE TO PLAY A GAME?
Chapter 57
Bullseye and I stare in silence at the last transcript in the file sent by Adrianna. I’ve glanced at this before but not put any particular meaning into it — other than with respect to Grandma’s sentiments about Irving.
It’s reprogramming her, and there are phrases from the sheet of paper.
“Do you know how binary computer code works?” Bullseye asks.
“Not really.”
“Think of information in a computer being made up of a bunch of basic light switches,” he says. “Some of the switches are on and others are off. They also correspond to numbers and even letters. For instance, if a switch is on, then its value is one. If it’s off, then its value is zero.”
“Okay.”
“But as we move down the line of switches, the value of each new switch gets higher by a factor of two. So if we have two switches, they have the following potential values.”
He writes on a napkin:
Both Off = 0 + 0 = 0
First Off, Second On = 0 + 1 = 1
First On, Second Off = 2 + 0 = 2
Both On = 1 + 2 = 3
I say: “The more switches you have, the potentially higher numbers. In theory, you can create impossibly huge numbers with long strings of ones and zeroes.”
“Not just in theory, but in practice. As I said earlier, these ones and zeroes ultimately make up all the underlying information in a computer. For instance, individual letters of the alphabet are represented by ones and zeroes organized in clumps of eight.”
On the computer, he calls up a web site. At the top of the site, it reads: “Binary Encoder.” There is an empty search box on the screen and beneath it, it reads: “Enter text.”
Into the box, he types: “Nat is dad.” He hits “Enter.” The encoder spits out the following:
01001110 01100001 01110100 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01100100 01100001 01100100
“Wow!” Bullseye says.
“What?”
“You’re going to be a dad.”
“Very funny. What does this have to do with Grandma?”
“Do you have that piece of paper you got from Pete’s library?”
I pull it from my pocket. At the top is a heading “1/0,” suggesting that each of the sets of memories has a one or a zero associated with it.
1/0
Yankees/Dodgers
Cursive/Block
12/7; Radio/Word-of-Mouth
Chevrolet/Cadillac
Standard/Automatic
Paternal car; Chevrolet/Cadillac
Slaughter Self/Butcher
Kennedy/Nixon
Married uniform/tie
Husband married uniform/tie
Saw moon landing/word-of-mouth
Union/non-union
Polio in family/No polio
Pink Cadillac/Blue Cadillac
Purple Chevrolet/Orange Chevrolet
One sibling/no sibling
Two sibling/three sibling
Procrastinator/punctual
Audited/Meticulous with books
If cursive, then “saw moon landing”
If union, then Yankees
If Procrastinator, then Polio
“It looks to me like a Kennedy equals one and Nixon equals zero; polio in the family equals one and no polio equals zero, and so on,” I say. “So what?”
“Therein lies the question. So what?”
On the laptop, I toggle back to Grandma’s last Human Memory Crusade transcript. We can see there that she has responded that her dad drove a PINK CADILLAC, she heard about Pearl Harbor on the RADIO, her husband was in a UNION, he drove a PURPLE CHEVROLET, she did NOT HAVE POLIO in her family, she supported JFK, was PUNCTUAL, she got her first color TV in 1967.
“Let’s assign each of those memories their ones and zeroes,” I say.
Bullseye’s already doing that. On a piece of paper, he’s written: “1111010.”
“Very elegant,” he says.
“Why?”
“Bits are written in chunks of eight ones and zeroes.”
“What’s it mean?”
“Let’s find out.”
On the laptop, he goes back to the binary decoder site.
Bullseye pastes Grandma’s ones and zeroes into the box. He hits “Enter.” Two new boxes appear. One box has the heading “Text.” The other box has the heading “Numerical.”
