Here’s the thing about banks I learn over the next three hours: They have safe deposit boxes big enough for a sedan if you’re ready to pay.
And they’ll do more or less anything else for money, too. For instance, whether you have an account or not (I choose a Midtown main branch I’ve never entered before), they will place your belongings in a box in a vault that can only be opened by way of a numerical code of your own devising. They will bring in a silver-haired senior partner at a prominent law firm to prepare a document ensuring no bank employee or manager will allow anyone—including myself—to access the box until after April 27th, then have the manager sign it and register copies with the bank, the law firm, and an envelope for my pocket. They will provide a written guarantee that the box will not be opened for at least ninety-nine years unless either myself or someone with my signed permission and the numerical code shows up. They even offer you a cup of reasonably decent coffee while you wait for it all to be done.
On the way home, I put in a call to a guy I know in the IT department at Columbia. After some roundabout, isn’t-this-heat-a-bitch chat, I ask him some questions. In particular, I want to know if it would be possible to alter the time a video download is registered to have occurred on a hard drive after it’s happened or, alternatively, to make any record of the download having happened go away.
He pauses, and I imagine the internal dialogue in his mind:
Q: Why would a professor of literature want to know that?
A: Porn.
Eventually, he answers no. It would be “pretty damn difficult” to erase a download entirely or make one saved on the 25th look like ithappened on the 28th. “Stuff like that always leaves fingerprints,” he says with a verbal wink, a warning for the next time I want to grab something nasty off the Internet without the wife finding out.
What I don’t tell him is the wife is gone. And that I don’t want to erase my download. What I want is to ensure that the time I transferred it from the camera to my laptop says the same thing as the date and time recorded on the footage itself: that the document reflects events—and spoken cities and numbers—that occurred before April 27th.
Like a magician ensuring nothing is up his sleeve, I feel like I’ve done everything I can to establish the conditions for a real trick. If I’m able to figure out what the cities and numbers mean on the 27th, and if they correspond to verifiable reality, the magic of the recording is real.
And as the Compendium Maleficarum ’s Brother Guazzo would note, if miracles are one way the savior proves his identity, magic is the way demons prove theirs.
L ATER, ANOTHER CHURCH . T HIS ONE OURS, IF ONLY NOMINALLY, AS our attendance has been limited to three Christmas Eves of the last five and an annual donation from Diane’s personal account. Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew, uptown on West 86th Street. Chosen by Diane for its progressive congregation and fuzzily inoffensive denomination (United Methodist). A community we chose but didn’t, in practice, belong to.
Though today it’s serving a purpose. Tess’s memorial service. Hastily arranged by Diane and announced to me only yesterday in an e-mail buckshot with “healing” and “process” and “closure.” I’ve come for her sake, to present a united parental front. It’s what you do on occasions such as these. You show up.
But now that I’m here, standing across the street from the building’s octagonal tower I’d barely noticed before but which today looks ominously Venetian, watching the dark-suited colleagues and peripheral friends and members of Diane’s extended family all haulingwreaths and their hesitant selves up the steps, I know I can’t go in. To enter would be the same as admitting that Tess is dead. If she isn’t, it might pull her away from me. And if she is, I don’t need the help of near-strangers to
And they’ll do more or less anything else for money, too. For instance, whether you have an account or not (I choose a Midtown main branch I’ve never entered before), they will place your belongings in a box in a vault that can only be opened by way of a numerical code of your own devising. They will bring in a silver-haired senior partner at a prominent law firm to prepare a document ensuring no bank employee or manager will allow anyone—including myself—to access the box until after April 27th, then have the manager sign it and register copies with the bank, the law firm, and an envelope for my pocket. They will provide a written guarantee that the box will not be opened for at least ninety-nine years unless either myself or someone with my signed permission and the numerical code shows up. They even offer you a cup of reasonably decent coffee while you wait for it all to be done.
On the way home, I put in a call to a guy I know in the IT department at Columbia. After some roundabout, isn’t-this-heat-a-bitch chat, I ask him some questions. In particular, I want to know if it would be possible to alter the time a video download is registered to have occurred on a hard drive after it’s happened or, alternatively, to make any record of the download having happened go away.
He pauses, and I imagine the internal dialogue in his mind:
Q: Why would a professor of literature want to know that?
A: Porn.
Eventually, he answers no. It would be “pretty damn difficult” to erase a download entirely or make one saved on the 25th look like ithappened on the 28th. “Stuff like that always leaves fingerprints,” he says with a verbal wink, a warning for the next time I want to grab something nasty off the Internet without the wife finding out.
What I don’t tell him is the wife is gone. And that I don’t want to erase my download. What I want is to ensure that the time I transferred it from the camera to my laptop says the same thing as the date and time recorded on the footage itself: that the document reflects events—and spoken cities and numbers—that occurred before April 27th.
Like a magician ensuring nothing is up his sleeve, I feel like I’ve done everything I can to establish the conditions for a real trick. If I’m able to figure out what the cities and numbers mean on the 27th, and if they correspond to verifiable reality, the magic of the recording is real.
And as the Compendium Maleficarum ’s Brother Guazzo would note, if miracles are one way the savior proves his identity, magic is the way demons prove theirs.
L ATER, ANOTHER CHURCH . T HIS ONE OURS, IF ONLY NOMINALLY, AS our attendance has been limited to three Christmas Eves of the last five and an annual donation from Diane’s personal account. Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew, uptown on West 86th Street. Chosen by Diane for its progressive congregation and fuzzily inoffensive denomination (United Methodist). A community we chose but didn’t, in practice, belong to.
Though today it’s serving a purpose. Tess’s memorial service. Hastily arranged by Diane and announced to me only yesterday in an e-mail buckshot with “healing” and “process” and “closure.” I’ve come for her sake, to present a united parental front. It’s what you do on occasions such as these. You show up.
But now that I’m here, standing across the street from the building’s octagonal tower I’d barely noticed before but which today looks ominously Venetian, watching the dark-suited colleagues and peripheral friends and members of Diane’s extended family all haulingwreaths and their hesitant selves up the steps, I know I can’t go in. To enter would be the same as admitting that Tess is dead. If she isn’t, it might pull her away from me. And if she is, I don’t need the help of near-strangers to
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