Hilbert

On a first date, the ideal number of questions to ask in any given ten-minute period was fifteen. After fifteen questions the asker risked diminishing returns. A good rule of thumb was to ask two fewer questions per ten-minute period on each subsequent date. Wolfred had gotten this out of a book. The book was a well-regarded bestseller by a business school graduate but it did not explain why the reader was supposed to ask fewer questions as the relationship progressed, so Wolfred had worked out several explanations of his own. Explanation number one: human beings have an ancient, evolutionarily beneficial craving to experience a change in tempo as often as possible. This has something to do with the millions of years it took for our semi-amphibious ancestors to crawl out of the water and onto dry land. Other species just stayed put, but not our ancestral line, not us. We kept wanting to move differently, feel time pass in new ways. Explanation number two: even with diligent preparation and a pristine question-asking skillset it was nearly impossible to maintain such a high rate of question-pitching without inadvertently decreasing the overall quality of the question-flow, leaving ugly holes in the conversation where low morale, annoyance, and doubt might slip in. Explanation number three: asking fewer questions kickstarted the process of Withdrawal, which was paramount for entering the Reassessment phase of the relationship, which, according to the book, results either in everlasting commitment or a clean break. Ideally the Reassessment phase should begin around the fifth date, but could be postponed to the ninth date, or whenever feels natural. Whichever comes first. 

Wolfred had recently gotten out of a relationship that had staggered on well beyond the ninth date. In fact, he had lived with this woman. Their kitchenware had mingled. He had licked her toes and moaned. But their commitment had not everlasted. He had moved out of her apartment without leaving a scrap of himself behind. All the scraps of himself were subsequently transferred to a one-bedroom condo he bought outright with the salary he’d been earning at his high-powered job, a job that required a demanding blend of commercial, tech, and creative acumen. Wolfred’s title was Deputy Director of Innovations, and he worked in a hybrid office-market-media-warehouse building downtown, twenty floors above the lobby wine bar where he was currently undergoing a better-than-average date with a twenty-five-year-old woman named Sylvie. The wine bar, called Gulp, advertised itself as America’s Largest Intimate Wine Bar, but it wasn’t even that. Largest in terms of self-regard, perhaps, but not in terms of square footage. Sylvie also worked in the building, at a café on the other side of the lobby that was repurposed at night into a popular reading venue for emerging anti-woke literary stars. 

Going into the date, the thing he’d really liked about her was her name—Sylvie—because its syllables unconsciously evoked the words “silky, violated lingerie.” He thought she could have been a lot more attractive than she presently appeared, had she not fallen victim to an insidious paradox that he encountered all-too-often on the dating scene: because she was young, she was beautiful, and yet, because she was young, she also donned the severe, self-administered haircut of an insecure young person. And overalls. Unlike Wolfred, who exercised five times a week and wore form-fitting t-shirts that emphasized his impeccable leg-to-torso ratio, Sylvie was not maximizing her assets. Still, as the date progressed, he found her charming. Her eyes were creaturely, alight with half-smothered curiosities, and accusations, and invitations to approach. She answered his questions slowly, in a high tight voice, with many flurries of blinking between bouts of verbal discourse, which threw off his rate of questions per ten minutes (RQ10), but he didn’t mind. He had plenty of other techniques to fall back on, and, anyway, she wasn’t all that met the eye. She was ambitious. He could hold the reins a little less firmly with a woman who was headed somewhere exciting.  

At least once a week—when her ten-hour shift at the café had come to its end, the espresso machines switched out for DJ booths and ketamine dealers—Sylvie traveled to the edges of the metropolis with the guitar she’d stashed in the supply closet all day. She played the songs she’d been writing since she was twelve years old in dimly lit bars that were always cramped, whether the pitifully small crowds showed up or not. There she passed a hat and people still knew what to do with it. They still had crumpled fives and tens on their person to part with. Nobody at the café paid with cash, or even a credit card. All financial transactions were conducted through an elaborate points system that only a few top bureaucrats at the café’s parent company understood, because they’d come up with it. The parent company operated a trendy membership club that included a suite of benefits—gyms, screen-based childcare, mini omakase—of which the café was only a minor part. Some activities—like working out—earned points, while others—like eating and drinking—spent them, but the values were always shifting. Most of the café’s customers found the system thrillingly opaque, better than the coffee and a lot better than the pastries, which were like chewing on bland edible stamps. Some had grand, paranoid theories about the points system; they stood in long lines for mediocre coffee, discussing their theories giddily, like television addicts all watching the same show. 

Wolfred liked the points system even though he was one of the few people who pretty much knew how it worked, due to his heavy involvement with the corporate class. He liked the system enough to try out getting his coffee there, and meet Sylvie, and lose a few more points meeting her again and again. What he didn’t like was live music—any music, really—but he appreciated Sylvie’s entrepreneurial spirit. Grinding beans wasn’t good enough for Sylvie, and why should it be? Wolfred pictured a future Sylvie whose hair had grown down to her hips. It was parted confidently in the middle and streamed behind her as she caressed her guitar before thousands of concert-goers, all with excellent credit, like an indie-rock angel in a flattering fringed vest and vegan leather pants. For a moment he even imagined he’d caught a pleasant whiff of incinerated overalls, only to remember that the rosemary sprig adorning his wine-based cocktail had been lightly torched to bring out its natural oils.

Wolfred was also amused to learn that Sylvie had been born and raised in the metropolis. He didn’t meet many locals these days. Real estate costs had risen sharply over the past decade. Seven years ago, Sylvie’s parents, seasoned city reporters and chronic renters, had been priced out, forced to acquire telemarketing jobs in the Northeastern provinces. In this economy, cold-calling was their only remunerative skill. But Sylvie was still fighting to stay. All her most cherished memories were of the metropolis. She had a sensitive artistic soul that felt fed on nostalgia, even when her salary couldn’t afford her proper nutrition. She had boxes of tiny paper photographs shaped like wristwatches with fat timepieces she’d printed out of the cheap digital camera her parents had bought her when she was a teenager. She kept a gluestick in her closet because she remembered what it was like to be a six-year-old smearing it across torn pieces of magazines. There were notecards covered with juvenile songwriting ideas about how the past was only yesterday, and the future will be here tomorrow, and “danger” is a six-letter word. In all the years since, she’d worked hard on her music. Her parents had gone into debt to pay for her schooling, leaving nothing for her little brother who now made twenty-times her salary as a videogame designer and hadn’t spoken to any of his relatives since he’d turned eighteen. Her voice became limp and teary when she talked to Wolfred about her brother, whose countenance she could now only hope to find in extended self-taped product reviews he posted to his personal website. 

Wolfred nodded sympathetically, although he kind of related to the resentful, financially responsible brother. But now was not the time to editorialize; he was busy making mental notes of everything Sylvie said. Remembering her answers to his questions was crucial because it paved the way for callbacks. These were the crown jewels of first-date banter and easily achievable for Wolfred who’d been on twenty-nine first dates since his regrettably drawn-out relationship with the woman who, in addition to toes, had long tangles of curly black hair shooting joyously out of her skull, a job she adored teaching special needs kids, and a mother who didn’t like him at all.  

While Sylvie continued to sip her wine and answer his questions, Wolfred daydreamed about a subscription service that would notify you when an ex had slept with someone else, each and every time they did it. It would be painful, but that pain would be nothing compared to the satisfaction of knowing, at every interstitial moment, that one’s ex was not having sex without them. There was, of course, the risk of fraud. Users would need to register their sex-having-timing data directly into the app, and users were human which meant that they were liars who could and absolutely would abuse the technology. Inevitably the moment would come when an irresponsible user would begin ordering their handheld device to deliver a jolt of jealousy and desire directly into their ex’s central nervous system (assuming the ex was likewise subscribed) whenever it suited them, no matter their actual rate of fucking (ARF), and the technology—brilliant, beautiful, innocent—would comply. Unless, of course, you could get the handheld device to pick up on the ARF autonomously through audio-visual clues, like a sleep track app that describes REM cycles by monitoring breathing and snores. Tracking would be a draw for investors who equal money which equals growth which equals profit which equals a sweet fucking time blowing that money on expensive dates which equals the ARF button self-smashing at a punishing scale which equals a world-annihilating ejaculation of endorphins. 

Sylvie said something about how she missed her dad the most, but she couldn’t afford to visit her parents for at least nine months, and that was only if she continued to mainly live off breakfast foods. Maybe she missed him the most because he seemed the least able to cope with being transplanted. He had the same desperate attachment to the metropolis that she did. When she saw his face on a screen it       made her even more sad, like the screen had actually trapped him, had shrunk him down small enough to where he could be placed in a pocket, or shoved in a drawer, where he’d never get away. Wolfred responded that it was unfortunate she couldn’t simply grab her old gluestick and glue the two of them back together. There was a long silence after that. It had been a classic callback, so the silence lasted longer than Wolfred expected. Perhaps she was in awe of his WIT (winning, intuitive talk). At the end of this extended pause, Sylvie made an anxious throat-clearing noise and continued to talk about Facetiming her dad. 

As for Wolfred, he’d been raised in a Northern California town by a single dad, an aging punk who kept his hair scraggly and long. The dad was a micro-legend for his generosity, his idiosyncratic manner of dress, and his great taste in music. Upon meeting Wolfred, locals who knew of his dad always expected the child to have a name like Drillbit or Stain. But it had been his mother, a wallpaper designer, who named him Wolfred, as one of her final acts on earth. Wolfred resented his dad’s bold self-presentation and ease with strangers, finding these qualities nowhere in himself, and rebelled against his origins by claiming to despise all music. With time, this claim solidified into an unshakable preference. Now, decades since he’d departed his hometown for good, Wolfred was a forty-one-year-old man who, rather than listen to music, only partook in “sonic experiences,” like forking over hundreds of dollars to wear foam headphones and lie down on a cushioned floor in a room full of fellow paying customers, and engaging in light primal scream therapy. 

He didn’t disclose any of this to Sylvie, much as she pried, but he did ask her if she had any hobbies, and to describe the finer points of songwriting, and what her favorite holiday was, and how often she spoke to her parents, and how she wound up working at the café, and where in the world she’d been outside of the metropolis, and how many roommates she had, and how much sleep she got per night on average, and whether she read any books, which afforded him the perfect opportunity to inject the conversation with a bit of self-deprecating humor pertaining to his own generally poor book-reading habits (an exception being the business school graduate’s book about maximizing life outcomes, the one that included the chapter about dating he was at this very moment putting to excellent use, which, of course, he did not mention). The self-deprecating humor went over well. Sylvie read a lot of books, it seemed, and said she could recommend some to him later. Recommend them to my dick, thought Wolfred, and grinned because, whether she realized it or not, Sylvie had just alluded to a future between the two of them, and that meant the deal was as good as done. He was going to sleep with her. Probably tonight. 

Sylvie’s wine glass steadily emptied and refilled, emptied and refilled, like a timer turning over. When the contents of the third glass had disappeared completely a buzzer went off in Wolfred’s head. Two hours and twenty-five minutes had passed. His lips were dry from asking questions. He’d had twice as many drinks as her and was experiencing some pleasant audiovisual symptoms: The volume on his inner monologue had been turned up and all objects in the wine bar were subtly orbiting him. He suspected he’d acquired a kind of rudimentary night vision that was impossible to test under present conditions. Unfortunately.

Wolfred applied luxury chapstick to his parched lips while Sylvie freshened up in the bathroom. When she returned, he proposed to show her the sound system at his apartment, which he hoped would impress her, taking care to conceal the fact that he only used it to blast his favorite podcasts at max fidelity while he tidied his condo. 

It took them a long time to exit the wine bar which, while not the largest in America, was still quite expansive and designed like a maze so that it could accommodate many intimate branches and offshoots. When they finally exited through the revolving glass doors of the hybrid office tower, the humidity fell upon them. August turned the metropolis inside out. One left the cold, fragrant fields of the aggressively air-conditioned commercial spaces and emerged into a musty, windowless room. Wolfred gently pressed Sylvie against one of the cement beams that propped up the building’s extensive awning and plunged his tongue into her mouth. Her lips orbited his. 

After a while, he got out his phone and ordered a car to drive the two of them to his apartment uptown. It was in a Renaissance Revival building facing the park, nine stories tall. The undulating gray-brown exterior—unmistakable, minutely detailed down to the engraved lion heads on either side of the entryway and the tall wrought-iron doors between them—produced the cumulative effect of being outmoded and busy, a consolation prize for residents who had been aiming at grandeur. It reflected the tastes of late 19th-century metropolis-dwellers. People who thought that sleeping soundly more than fifty feet above the earth was outrageous, and that lions were amazing. Sylvie stood before the stoop with her jaw hanging open. There was something new in her eyes, Wolfred noted, a kind of spiritual awe that sent a pang of disappointment to his groin.

Hand-in-hand, they crossed the threshold. 

As they made their way into the lobby, which likewise had maintained its old-fashioned touches—the tiled floors in twisty rubber-band patterns, the armored wall of silver mailboxes—Sylvie suddenly abandoned her slow, ponderous attitude and became marvelously alert. 

“Hilbert should be here,” she remarked brightly.

“What?” asked Wolfred, caught off-guard by the unfamiliar name.

“Hilbert, I said, in his metal foldout chair, grinning with his mouth of missing teeth.” 

Wolfred, not knowing what to make of this, fell back on his questions. “All of his teeth are missing?”

“No just some.” 

“Hilbert, I take it, is a friend of yours?”

That was not what Sylvie had meant at all. She worried, however, that if she were to proceed with the true explanation it might prevent her from continuing to penetrate deeper into Wolfred’s building, and she very much wished to enter now. Her passivity was gone; there was no turning back. So, instead, she said “something from the Internet, never mind” and showed Wolfred that she had all her teeth.

They turned the corner to catch an elevator and here the aesthetic of the building changed dramatically. Opposite the gleaming elevators were giant framed photographs of athletes sweating in high-def, the words “relax” and “vibe” super-imposed upon them in chunky purple font. The hallways were plasticky, sleek, and painted crimson. Standing there was like being trapped in some horrible anatomical diagram, with views of the body’s exterior instead of windows.  

“At the end of the hallway there’s a rec room,” said Wolfred, pointing. “It’s got great amenities. A billiards table. A small recording studio. There’s a sculpture of the MTV astronaut riding a pony. Or maybe it’s a regular astronaut. There’s snacks. The building was totally gutted and reno-ed five years ago. In winter it utilizes heat from the earth’s core.”  

“OK,” said Sylvie. Her nerves were buzzing, sharpening her. She was completely steady now. They were ascending the building. Climbing to the top floor. This was it. By the time they reached the front door her body had willed itself to become sober and susceptible to everything—the tantalizing give of the velvety new hallway carpeting, the complacent slit of the keycard reader, the heavy scent of floral misuse—but this was undoubtedly it, the apartment she’d grown up in, the one her parents had lost when the landlord sold the building to a developer who’d apparently converted it into a residential pleasure-dome for metropolitans who could afford to pay in full for their condos. 

When she’d been growing up there, the only “amenity” the building had offered was Hilbert. Sylvie was swept up in her memories of him now as she stepped through Woldfred’s door, into a past life. Hilbert could hardly have been called an amenity at all since he was only an ancient, hunched, mostly incomprehensible man who had sat on his chair in this building’s lobby from early afternoon until late at night each and every day. He did not live in the building, and he never got the door—but his presence was not questioned. Residents got the door for him; they were accustomed to the unsanctioned vigil he kept over the lobby. Nobody knew where he slept, or why he showed up each day. He was an object of casual pity, not of curiosity. The chair arrived and departed with him. Sylvie’s friends had always been afraid of him the first time they stopped by for a playdate, but after a few visits they hardly noticed him at all. He smiled, said his mostly incomprehensible thing; they smiled back politely and nodded as if they had understood. It had not occurred to Sylvie until this moment that he might have once lived in the building, too. Had he, like Sylvie, lost his home? Had he then settled for benignly haunting it, as she would now do?

“Can I get you anything?” asked Wolfred, a little hopeful, a little thrown off his game by Sylvie’s rapturous, wandering eyes. They were in the apartment now. Some walls had been knocked down to produce a one-bedroom apartment with an open kitchen, but Sylvie still saw the space as it once had been. Can you? thought Sylvie. Only I know where everything is. 

She ignored his question and began stepping around the perimeter of the apartment, like a detective. This is where you got ready for your first day of Kindergarten, she thought, and this is where your best friend explained to you what sex was—she was sleeping over on your trundle bed—and this is where your dad accidentally dropped the knife on your hand while he was chopping vegetables and you were dancing around him—see? You still have the scar, right there—

Wolfred followed her to the kitchen. She wouldn’t tell him any of this for a while. Maybe she’d never tell him. She could easily do that. He was smaller than her now. He was squatting in her shadow. All evening long the barrage of questions had come at her, but now she could beat him. He was on her turf. He hadn’t taken anything from her. Nobody had ever taken anything from her. 

This is where you made out for the first time—on a dare—and this is where you made out with a guy for the first time—you dared yourself—and this is where your best friend—still the same best friend, but that would soon change—tied you to your mother’s desk chair and wouldn’t let you leave until you sang one song for her like you meant it—was that a very odd thing for her to have done?

He kissed her and she kissed back harder, like an animal attacking what had attacked her first. By the time he’d begun loosening her clothes she’d finished taking all of his off. Her pleasure was incidental to kissing, touching, sex. It was not that she dissociated from her body; her body simply had too much to pay attention to. Her body was dispersed throughout the whole room. It did not know how to block things out. All day long she was exactly where she needed to be—on the bus, on the train, manning the espresso machine, bent over an acoustic guitar on a stool with one leg dangling, listening patiently to a friend’s complaints or a date’s clumsy manipulations—and when she finally collapsed into bed at night she’d only find more obligations to berate herself with. Why hadn’t she been a little quicker? More forceful? It seemed that no matter how much she got done, she was always ceding more ground than she gained. But sex was different. Sex was a fight she would not lose.  

This is where you first drew blood, and this is where you fell down, and this is where you learned to get back up again in a casual jokey way—not putting anyone out—and this is where you saw your mother cry—far worse than crying yourself—and this is where you acquired the fleeting power to read minds, and this is where you sang a famous country and western song for your neighbors, and this is where you first felt the ecstatic thrum of applause enter your body, and this is where you levitated. 

Standing there naked he did not appear any more natural than he had with his clothes on. His chest was puffed out, which made it look like his body was too big for him. Like there was something small, shivering, and overworked operating the levers inside him, smashing the chest-puffer button at near-dangerous rates. He was, in all respects, standing at attention. The thing inside him was ready to take orders from her now. No more asking.

This is where the music poured in and this is where the music drained out. This is where you pretended to save the world. This is where you chipped your tooth. The tempo changed often, but there was a logic to it. It made a sing-song kind of sense. There were solos and there were harmonies and there were refrains. Words shooting joyously out of your skull. All the scraps of yourself. This is where you crawled out of the water, and onto dry land.