Robert Wilson: The Affinities

“In the end,” Miriam said, “the point of all this is to locate you on the grid of the human socionome.”

I took her word for it. The details were a well-kept secret. Meir Klein, who invented the test, had done basic research in social teleodynamics when he was teaching at the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, outlining what it would take to construct a taxonomy of human social behavior. But the meat of his work had taken place after he was hired by InterAlia, and the details were locked behind airtight nondisclosure agreements. The process by which people were assorted into the twenty-two Affinities had never been fully described or peer-reviewed. The best anyone could say was that it seemed to work. And that was good enough for me.

I liked the idea of it. I wanted it to be true. We’re the most cooperative species on the planet—is there anything you own that you built entirely with your own hands, from materials you extracted from nature all by yourself? And without that network of cooperation we’re as vulnerable as three-legged antelopes in lion territory. But at the same time: what a talent we have for greed, for moral indifference, for wars of conquest on every scale from kindergarten to the U.N. Who hasn’t longed for a way out of that bind? It’s as if we were designed for life in some storybook family, in a house where the doors are never locked and never need to be. Every half-baked utopia is a dream of that house. We want it so badly we refuse to believe it doesn’t or can’t exist.

Had Meir Klein found a way into that storybook house? He never made that claim, at least not explicitly. But even if all he had found was the next best thing—well, hey, it was the next best thing .

The final test session was four hours in front of a monitor with my body hooked up to some serious telemetry. Miriam appeared during breaks, bearing gifts of coffee and oatmeal raisin cookies.

The program running on the monitor was a series of interactive tests, using photographs, symbols, text, video, and occasional spoken words. The computer correlated my test performance with my facial expressions, eye movements, posture, blood pressure, EEG readings, and the beating of my heart.

The tests themselves were pretty simple. There was a spatial-relations test that worked like a game of Tetris. There was an animated puzzle involving a runaway train full of passengers headed for certain destruction: do you throw a switch that causes the train to change tracks, saving all the passengers but killing a couple of pedestrians who happen to be in the way, or do you let the train roll on, dooming everyone aboard it? Some of the tests seemed to touch on identifiable themes (ethnicity, gender, religion), but the majority were pretty obscure. At the end of four hours it began to seem like what was really being tested was my patience.

Then the screen went blank and Miriam popped in, smiling. “That’s it!”

“That’s it?”

“All done, Mr. Fisk, except for the analysis! You should get your results within a couple of weeks, maybe sooner.”

She helped me peel off the headset and the telemetry patches. “Hard to believe it’s over,” I said.

“On the contrary,” she said. “With any luck, you’re just getting started.”

I stepped out of the building into a hot, humid night. The last of the business crowd had gone home, abandoning the neighborhood to speeding cabs and a couple of sparsely populated coffee shops. I walked to the College Street subway station, where a homeless guy was propped against a wall with a change cup in front of him. He gave me a look that was either imploring or contemptuous. I put a dollar coin in his cup. “Bless you,” he said. At least I think the word was “bless.”

By the time I got back to my apartment a drilling rain had begun to fall. The short walk from the subway left me drenched, but that didn’t seem like such a bad thing once I had a towel in my hand and a roof over my head. In the bathroom I looked at my cheek where the cop had clubbed me. The bruise was fading. All that was left of the gash was a pale pink line. But I dreamed of the incident that night, when the room was dark and the rain on the window sounded like the roar of massed voices.

Ten days passed.

Two interviews for a summer internship went nowhere. I finished an end-of-term project (a Flash video animation) and handed it in. I fretted about my future.

On the tenth day I opened an email from InterAlia Inc. My test results had been assessed, it said, and I had been placed in an Affinity. Not just any Affinity, but Tau, one of the big five. My test fees would be debited to my credit card, the email went on to say. And I would be hearing from a local tranche shortly.

I was headed to school when my phone burbled. I didn’t let it go to voice mail. I picked up like a good citizen.

It was Aaron. “Things took a turn for the worse,” he said. “Grammy Fisk’s back in the hospital. And this time you really need to come down and see her.”

The town of Schuyler was situated at the northeastern corner of the New York State county of Onenia. “Onenia” was a corruption of the Mohawk word onenia’shon:’a, meaning “various rocks,” and for more than a century Schuyler’s primary business had been its quarries: pits carved into the fragile karst that underlay the county’s unproductive farmland. Since the 1970s most of those quarries had grown unprofitable and had been shut down, left to fill with greasy brown water that rose in the spring and evaporated over the course of the long summers. As a child I had been warned never to play around the old quarries, and of course every kid I knew had gone there as often as possible, biking down county roads where grasshoppers flocked in the heat like flurries of buzzing brown snow.

On the way to my father’s house I drove past trailheads I still recognized, hidden entrances to pressed-earth roads where trucks had once carted limestone to stoneworks across the state. Stone from Onenia County had helped build scores of libraries and government buildings, back when libraries and government buildings still commanded a certain respect. On Schuyler’s main street there were a few remnants of that era: an old bank, gutted to house a Gap store but still wearing its limestone façade; a Carnegie library in the Federal style, with a tiny acreage of public park to separate it from the liquor store on one side and the welfare office on the other. All dark now: I had left Toronto in an afternoon drizzle and reached Schuyler just after a rainy sunset.

Despite hard times there was still a “good” part of Schuyler, where the town’s diminishing stock of prosperous families kept house: families like the Fisks, the Symanskis, the Cassidys, the Muellers. The windows of their houses glittered as if their wealth had been compressed into rectilinear slabs of golden light, and the houses seemed to promise ease, comfort, safety, all the consolations of family—though this was often false advertising.

I pulled into the driveway of my father’s house and parked next to Aaron’s Lexus and behind my father’s Lincoln Navigator. The same comforting light spilled out of the house’s windows, painting the rain-slick leaves of the willow in the yard. But no one was happy inside. The family crowded around as I came through the door: my father, my brother, my stepmother Laura. Twelve-year-old Geddy stood behind Mama Laura, and when I approached him he offered his hand with a solemnity that might have been funny under other circumstances. I noticed his hair had been cut into a military-style buzz, probably as a result of my father’s crusades to make Geddy “more masculine.” I had been the subject of my father’s attention often enough that I recognized the symptoms.