A young editor flies out to Palo Alto to coax some writing out of the famous Dr. Petrushik, an academic savant at the intersection of philosophy, sociology, and computer science who basically created an entire field. He’s not interested–until he tells the editor he’ll meet her in the cactus garden.
An eerie, electric, surprising story from Molly Dektar, author of The Ash Family.
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The Editors
We were sitting in a backyard in Palo Alto. The sky had gone from blue to yellow and was quickly heading back to blue. The grass was as smooth as felt. We sat on woven chairs arrayed around the bulbous terra cotta fireplace. On its painted tiles, half-dead coals were luminously simmering. It was difficult to drink my cocktail because so much shiso leaf was caught in the straw. “I’m a great admirer of your work,” I said to Dr. Petrushik.
The open house was in celebration of a new university initiative in tech ethics. We were at the residence of one of the university trustees. The house was complexly constructed so that it was hard to define which parts were porch, and which parts were rooms with all their doors and windows open—even with all its terra cotta and redwood, it gave off an impression of vagueness. Startup people, mainly, academics, investors, some corporate people, moved quietly around the half-open half-closed spaces.
Petrushik had pale, shell-like irises. “Thank you,” he said. “Are you a student here?”
“No,” I said.
He nodded. “I didn’t think that they let students into this party.”
He wore a windbreaker and navy chinos. He was sporting, strapping, strangely unintellectual. He looked somewhat eager to be done talking with me. I was decades younger than him. I waited for him to ask where I worked, but he didn’t care. He just wanted to know that I wasn’t a student.
The publisher had told me that Petrushik was a dick. A colleague, who had been his student, said that he was a dick. Countless essays said that he had created a field, something at the intersection of philosophy, sociology, and computer science. His 1989 paper “On Actuarial Ethics” had been cited more than twenty thousand times. His major argument was that just as advances in medicine led to the creation of bioethics—to systematize, for example, why it is wrong to kill one person to harvest their organs to save ten—advances in computation must lead to the creation of actuarial ethics—or we risk encoding the biases of the past in the computational decisions of the future. I knew I was out of my depth talking to him, but I was guided by a higher power, the publisher, who hoped he would contribute an introduction to the applied ethics guide that our company was putting out.
The publisher was in New York getting a lumpectomy, probably just this minute coming round in a hospital bed. I imagined her uncomfortable, pressing for a nurse. I was just an editor. I was filling in for her. I’d approached him because it was pointless to attend this event without speaking to anyone, that was the whole idea of filling in, and starting big made sense to me, as, with his congressional testimonies and his billionaire relationships, he’d certainly seen the worst of human nature from his position. I imagined presenting the publisher with good news, making her feel better. She could read my update in her hospital bed.
“Would you like another drink?” I said. He looked down at his condensed glass and tilted it around to swirl the piece of lime. I wondered about the distribution of his intelligence. I tended to think that intelligence beams out of intelligent people all the time. He might look at his lime and see decision trees, or the agglomeration of them, random forests, which he’d written about in his most recent publication, which was seven years ago; no one knew exactly what he was working on now. A random forest is when all the decision trees make their decisions, and then vote.
I wore a black dress. I’d had it since I was eighteen and it was pilled under the arms.
“I don’t need one,” he said.
“Let me give you my card,” I said.
“Okay,” he said wearily. He took it and read it. “Okay, thanks, Meghan.”
—
At eleven pm, as I lay on the massive white hotel bed, feeling guilty about the publisher paying for it, he emailed me. It was shocking to me that he was all right having this email in his records. The publisher is not going to believe this, I thought. But I would not be telling her about it.
“Meghan,” he’d written, “If you’re awake, would you like to meet up?”
At first I just put my phone down on the bed. Within a few seconds I began to imagine a quid pro quo. I’ll see you, and you’ll write an introduction for our report.
The publisher was definitely well out of surgery by now but she hadn’t emailed me. I didn’t understand how close we were supposed to be. Or really, how distant. We worked side by side for all the most high-cognition hours of our lives and acted like we barely knew each other. We had never tested the edges of this norm.
I refreshed my email. It had been five minutes now since he sent his message. I tried to imagine what I would be willing to do. I didn’t want to give him the wrong idea. All the pieces were there, and obvious, but the vagueness was built right into the structure. If I went, I was telling him that I wanted to give us room to maneuver.
I emailed him. “Sure, I’m around. Where would you like to meet?”
Three minutes passed. “The cactus garden.” He attached a photo of a campus map, which was endearing. I looked it up on my phone.
—
I walked through the tall hissing grasses. There had been so many wildfires that summer and I kept thinking of sparks catching in the grass. Easy to say that the ecosystem needs to burn when you’re safe in a big inorganic city. I wondered what he wanted from me in the cactus garden.
I’d put my black dress on again and I was so cold. I wore a cardigan and I stretched the sleeves out over my hands. A few clouds lay over the stars and resembled the Milky Way. I didn’t want to tell the publisher about this. No one should know about this: this trip he’d given me under the fine-leafed, bending oaks, over the broad paths of milky dust, through the silver dead grass that smelled so intensely of those fleeting herbs, marjoram, thyme.
—
I arrived first. The cactus garden started small on the edges, with rotund cacti and little beds of succulents. I circled it with my phone light until I found a path leading in. Then the moon was bright enough. I walked past barrels and columns gleaming on all their geometric skewers, and under an archway formed by a long leaning torch-like growth covered in tiny yellow flowers. The path was a spiral maze. Finally, in the center, I found enormous yucca trees. One tree’s strong pipe arms held up spiky heads. Another tree looked like a group of men in threatening armor.
There was Petrushik, arriving at a quick virile pace. He wore a sweater now, and tennis shoes, and in the dark, our age difference was not so evident.
He thanked me for meeting him, and I said he was welcome, and then, with a small intense pleasure, I let the conversation lapse. I was not going to ask why he had summoned me. It was his turn now.
“Let’s look around,” he said. He had a calmer manner now than at the party, like he was just meeting with a student. Earlier he’d seemed bored and tense, when he’d looked down at his drink and turned down my offer for another.
“The key thing is not to trip,” I said. I watched for his smile.
We started walking. One of the tall cacti seemed to have white tissues on its side. Some litter tossed by the wind, I thought, or stuck on by students. But then when we approached I saw that the soft white forms were flowers. Petrushik caught me looking. “Night bloomer,” he said.
We continued around the paths, on an inefficient tour. Some of the cacti were knotted, tumorous. Some of them were straight as poles. Some of them were concentric spirals, unfolding out increasingly enormous circles of saw-edged diamonds. Some of them were fuzzy with ultra fine thorns, some all protruding knives, some wild with paddles, some lumpen and small and childlike.
For a time all we did was point out the cacti to each other. Petrushik had, again endearingly, brought a flashlight, and he illuminated the long yellow spike for me, the Century Plant, which, he recalled, had last bloomed two administrations ago. He showed me the boojum tree, tethered to the ground like a lunatic.
“I’m worried about my son,” said Petrushik, as he pointed his light at the pale black-eyed bark of the boojum tree. “He is getting really into painkillers.” He clicked the light off. “Do you have any friends who have gone down that path?”
“Yes,” I said. Two kids from my high school, a brother and a sister, both dead now. When the light went off I noticed again how cold I was. I wondered how old his son was.
“Do you know how people get the painkillers?” he said.
“I think someone gets a prescription, and then sells them out,” I said. “Or, really, in cities there are probably more industrial sources for the pills.” I didn’t want a pause anymore, I rushed to fill it. “It’s extremely upsetting and I am sorry for your son. I’m glad he has you as a father.”
“Have you ever tried them?”
“No,” I said. Painkillers were some kind of shimmering illusion that pulled all kinds of people into them, pearly, heavenly, singing, I didn’t try to fathom them, I was afraid of them.
“As soon as I saw you, I thought, you look plugged in with the youth, I don’t always get to meet people like you.” It was hard to see his face, and I knew he couldn’t really see mine. “Do you think you could get some here in Palo Alto, if you needed to?”
“What? They’re everywhere,” I said.
“How would you get them?”
“Uh,” I said. “I guess one could walk around and look for someone to ask.” At this point I still thought he was trying to imagine what his son had been through.
He stood close to me, and crossed his arms over his chest.
“Can I be honest with you, Meghan?”
“Of course,” I said. I didn’t look at him. I looked at a cactus.
“I don’t have a son,” he said.
“That’s okay,” I said.
“To be honest with you, I want to end my life,” he said.
“Oh,” I said immediately. “Got it.”
I tried to remember the rules for talking to people who felt this way. I remembered that when my boss received her cancer diagnosis she hated people saying “I know how you feel.” She hated people who had recovered saying that, and she hated people who’d never had cancer saying that. She only wanted “I know how you feel” from people who currently, actively had cancer, especially if they had worse prognoses than hers. At last, I said, “I’m sorry.”
He lifted his palm up and then dropped it.
“Would you like to talk about it?” I said.
“No,” he said.
I wish I could say that I pressed him to talk. That we sat down in the dust and had a long, ranging conversation on strength and humanity, and that I issued forth simple goodwill and youthfulness, and that he pondered ethics in ways he’d forgotten himself capable of, and that the desert night made it appropriate to cling to each other for warmth, and that our souls touched and the sun came up over his renewed life. I can’t say that, but I wish I could say that when I got back to my hotel I made a new anonymous email address and reported a concern to the head of his department. I can’t say that, but I wish I could say that I asked the publisher what to do. The publisher would have handled it, I wouldn’t have had to do any more than email her with a sympathetic note at the top, but I can’t even say that.
When I’m being kind to myself, I tell myself that I had this belief that people who want to die are not reasonable—people who want to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge don’t turn around, when they can’t get over the guard rails, and throw themselves into traffic instead. People aren’t reasonable; little blockades, like not getting pills right when you want them, can destroy a whole plan.
All I can say is that I didn’t give him advice on where to find pills because I didn’t know where he should go.
—
We parted, and two months later, he wrote back with extreme kindness to my request for him to contribute to our volume. The publisher was thrilled. It was the major factor in my promotion. But he never wrote his introduction because he died the following year. He died suddenly. A few people forwarded us the university announcement, and then on came the Twitter tributes, the op-ed in the Times, the essays in various journals, so many people writing about how his work in the 80s inspired them to go into philosophy, or sociology, or computer science, so many people writing about the breadth of his knowledge, the sort of breadth that creates a new field, the brazen curiosity that can be skimming, arrogant, wildly off.
I don’t know what he died of. No one said whether it was his choice or not, which makes me wonder if it was one of those edge cases, how close the search for calm is to the search for death, I mean, how close by they might be, these two things that seem so different, one meant to quench the other, calm in the face of death. Or death to steal away your calm, once at last you achieve it. I think about his heart beating slower and slower and slower and I remember the night blooming cacti, the tall rippled shafts with their bluish needles, the white flowers unfolding from the scales.
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Molly Dektar is from North Carolina and lives in Queens, NY. The Ash Family (Simon and Schuster, 2019) is her first novel. Her second novel, The Absolutes, is forthcoming from Mariner in 2023.