Divided by Design

The night I decided to love her it was raining, in a city neither of us lived in.

I have gone back over this entry more than any other. It is the earliest one and it is the one I can least check. There is no pad for it. I did not know yet that I would want one.

The conference ran two days. I spoke at ten on predictive modelling. She spoke at two on the failure of predictive modelling. Two hundred people were in the room for both. We disagreed in public, in front of all of them, and neither of us knew it. I found out fourteen months later. It became one of our better arguments.

The bar. Eleven. She was at a table by the window with a book and a glass of something amber.

I noticed the book first. Face-down. Spine stressed. Pages fanned. A book gets into that condition by being carried, not by being read.

Then her.

She was turning the glass. Quarter rotations. Ninety degrees, held, ninety degrees. I watched four of them before I stopped counting, which is not a thing I do.

I stood at the bar longer than ordering required. I had three approaches by the time the drink came. All three were built to produce a favourable impression. That was the wrong specification. I knew it at the time and I did not have another one.

I sat two seats away. I did not introduce myself.

“You’re the one who thinks systems explain everything,” she said. She did not look up.

“You’re the one who thinks they explain nothing.”

She looked at me then. Not hostile. Not warm. A person revising an assumption while you watch.

“I think they explain everything except the parts that matter.”

“Which parts.”

“Why. Systems are good at what. They’re decent at how. Ask them why and they give you more what.”

“Why requires intention. Intention requires a subject. Most systems don’t have subjects.”

“Most,” she said.

We talked until the bar closed. I have tried to reconstruct the sequence and cannot. I have the sentences. I do not have the order. We agreed about nothing except that the conference had been a waste and that the rain was not going to stop. It had been going since the afternoon: a low, patient, administrative rain.

Standing up, she said: “If you’re going to keep talking to me, you should know I’m difficult.”

“I know.”

“You don’t know yet.”

“I know you’re the kind of difficult that has reasons. That’s the only kind worth anything.”

Her face changed. I recorded it as recognition and left it at that.

Three years later, at two in the morning, in a room with a fan in it, she turned over and looked at me with the same face and said say that again. I was still calling it recognition. I had not been any further into it than that in three years.

Outside, under the overhang.

“This doesn’t feel like a beginning,” she said.

“No.”

“More like a middle.”

DIVIDED BY DESIGN · PROLOGUE