So one day (when Mette was six) this guy showed up who was her father. This was at the old farmhouse. Now that she’s almost twenty-one, Mette has an idea from novels and movies that this is supposed to be a big emotional moment, fraught with tension or alienation, or maybe should involve blaming, or whatever. But at the time she just thought, “Right, a father. I figured there had to be one somewhere.” He didn’t annoy her with a lot of presumptuous questions and fake adult attention and invasiveness, and they figured out that they shared some interests, so their relationship settled pretty quickly into mainly email correspondence, which Mette far preferred, and still does, to both the excruciating tedium of face-to-face interactions and the annoying tendency toward real-time expectations of texting and messaging. And he’s been a good part of her life, and he’s a decent guy, and maybe she’s being conceited but she does have the impression that maybe she’s his only friend outside of his work, so there’s that to consider, anyway.
She’s arrived at Broad Street. To her right, up the hill, the Space Needle looms behind an office building. It’s 10:52. 1052 is 2 times 526, which Mette has a vague memory might be a centered pentagonal number, and also 4 times 263, which is a safe prime, meaning if you subtract one and divide by two you get a Sophie Germain prime, namely 131. But most importantly: 1052, 30, 9, 81, 65—unhappy. Probability of four randomly chosen numbers being unhappy, 53.9 percent.
She heads up Broad Street toward the Space Needle.
The fact that she used to daydream a lot about Wishner, Steward of Chipmunks, maybe suggests she did miss having a father more present in her life, who knows? Navel gazing is not her thing. This is a pretty boring area of wide streets, modern office buildings, banks. It’s sunny, and the temperature has risen to probably about 50 degrees, so people are out walking, and she sees more ahead, where she can make out what she thinks is probably the old grounds of the 1962 World’s Fair, now called, apparently, the Seattle Center. There’s still a working monorail, the kind of thing her father would weirdly enthuse over.
She crosses Broad Street and now, with the Space Needle only a hundred yards ahead, the sidewalk is getting crowded. In Astoria, she used to lie in bed—at this juncture in a personal recollection people always say “for hours,” but the activity she’s remembering probably maxed out at twenty minutes—where no one could see her but the birds, which fact she liked (her near-invisibility), and she’d think of the birds with gratitude as she watched them cross her field of vision, or hover in view, etc. Some of the first graphic programming she ever did was encoding different parameters to see how convincingly she could model the flocking behavior of starlings. She knew someone else had already done this, but she wanted to figure it out for herself and who knows, maybe come up with something better. The assumption for all these types of behaviors is that each individual follows a small number of simple rules, and that the complexly ordered behavior of the whole is an emergent phenomenon. (She ended up merely reproducing the original study in a more cumbersome form. Hey, she was only fourteen.) Plausible rules for people on a crowded sidewalk: collision avoidance, obviously. Probably a cultural tendency everywhere except England and Japan to shift to the right in doing so. Probably more individual variation than among birds, for example a spectrum of favorite speeds whenever allowed. Might be fun to fool around with the modeling, if she were still interested in anything.
Around the time she was trying to program bird flight, she was in Astoria Park hoping to see a chipmunk, and she came across something someone had painted on the path. They’d used a stencil to create a flock of birds, so when you looked down at the pavement it was as if you were looking up into the sky. The flock crossed the path, spreading as it went. There was a break in the middle of the flock where the person had painted, also with stencils, “How do you decide where you belong?”
Avoiding collisions by shifting to the right, striving to maintain her preferred pace, she arrives at the traffic turnaround at the base of the Needle. She looks up. Sixties Futurism against a blue sky. Her father would gesticulate, exclaim, lecture. Why is he so happy all the time? What’s wrong with her? It’s now 10:59. 1059, 107, 50—unhappy. Probability of five randomly chosen numbers all being unhappy, 46.2 percent. Math gods’ message received. Height of Space Needle Observation Deck, according to the sign: 520 feet. Divide by 16, take the square root: 5.7 seconds. She closes her eyes, counts out the seconds in her head. Opens her eyes again.
Oops.
She stands there for what seems a very long time—actually, twelve minutes—while people pass to either side, occasionally bump against her. Human Brownian motion. Voices in her ears. It makes her feel claustrophobic. When chipmunks are overcrowded, their bodies produce more androgen. The male offspring of females with excess androgen display bisexual tendencies, leading to less reproduction.
She looks up at the Needle again. Is she merely play-acting? The thought fills her with self-disgust.
She has never met three of her four grandparents. Her father’s father, Vernon Fuller, now deceased, was Tamias Newmanensis, Steward of Newman. Of her father’s mother (name forgotten, also deceased) she knows only that
