Human Meme

The Watermark is about a city that computes its poor as calories. And it is about the man who does the computing. His name is Anselm Wenger. He is thirty-one that winter. He is a clerk of the Relief Bureau, the best computer on the fourth floor of the Provident Building. By day he prices the poor in units of food. By night he sings in the cellars of the Quarter, and the Quarter sings back. And in his room over the baker's, he writes down what the tables could not hold. On slips. In a hand smaller than the Bureau's hand. The slips live in a tobacco tin. Two archives, then: the building's and the tin's. The year this book covers is the year those two accounts settle.

Somewhere in your kitchen there is a glass, and you trust it. You washed it, you shelved it, and if I dropped one bead of ink into it right now, you would never drink from it again. Not after a rinse. Not after ten rinses. One drop, and the glass is ruined in a place no sponge can reach. Hold that feeling. This episode is about the people who turned that feeling into law, and about the one room in the world where the feeling was finally told no. In 1986, in a laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, a researcher named Paul Rozin dipped a dead cockroach into a glass of apple juice. The roach was sterilized. The subjects watched the sterilizing. They knew, as a matter of certified fact, that the juice was clean. Nobody drank it. In another test, people labeled a bottle of plain sugar with the word poison in their own handwriting, and then flinched at their own label. Nothing touched the sugar except a word. The word was enough.

Somewhere ahead of you, on a day no calendar has marked yet, someone you love is going to say a final sentence, and you may be the one who hears it. You will lean in. You will carry what they said for the rest of your life. And you will believe it, because nearly everything in you insists that a person at the end of everything has no reason left to lie. The law believes it too. There is a maxim behind that faith, old enough to arrive in Latin: nemo moriturus praesumitur mentiri. No one about to die is presumed to lie. Out of that presumption the courts built one of the strangest doors in the law of evidence, the dying declaration. Hearsay, the secondhand report of what somebody said outside the courtroom, is generally barred at trial. The words of the dying walk through.

At two in the morning, somewhere in this country, a college student is hitting submit on an essay she wrote herself. Every word is hers. By breakfast, a piece of software will hand her professor a percentage saying a machine wrote it. No hearing, no cross-examination, no appeal. Just the number, and the number is confident, and confidence is the whole product. I have spent the past year writing a book about that number. It is called Swimming the Author. It is out now, in paperback and on Kindle, and the title comes from the oldest confidence machine on record. In the seventeenth century, when a woman in England was accused of witchcraft, one way to test her was water. They bound her, thumbs to toe, and lowered her into a pond. King James himself supplied the theory: the water, being pure, shall refuse to receive the guilty in her bosom. So if she floated, the water had rejected her, and she hanged. If she sank, she was innocent, and she drowned proving it. The pond could only convict. That is the machine. Everything since has been a redesign.

Did you know you have taken one breath since since you started reading this? Possibly two. None of them was a decision. Today will take roughly twenty thousand out of you, and eighty years will take something close to six hundred million, and that is the whole allocation. There is no mechanism anywhere in your body for adding to it. A brain deprived of oxygen begins taking damage within minutes of an interruption. What does it mean to say that something breathes? Because a cave does it. Wind Cave in South Dakota moves air in and out of a hole in the ground hard enough to take a hat off a man's head, in and out, on a rhythm you can stand beside and feel. A fire does it. Anyone who has watched a hearth has seen a flame draw and settle. A bellows does it, a bagpipe does it, and a machine at a bedside in an intensive care unit does it about fourteen times a minute for somebody who cannot. So which of those is breathing, and which is only a good impression of it? I wrote a book to find out. It is called Tidal Volume, and it is out now.