In order to neutralize M’s self-consciousness, I would have to veil my project in the guise of a study. I’d say, “M, I’m hoping you’ll participate in an experiment that involves graphing your physical responses to a seemingly random array of objects, using several sensors that you may attach privately and by yourself in my extremely clean bathroom that makes me a statistical anomaly to the crowdsourced opinion that twenty-something-year-old bachelors are slobs: one sensor on your carotid artery, three around your heart, one midtorso, and one inside your vagina. Okay?”
No, that’s going too far. We’ll stop at the midsection.
“Sure, Lincoln, no problem,” M replies （in my fevered imagination）。 And so we begin. And what does x turn out to be? The rubber bands? The hippo? The small china cat I found at a garage sale and bought because of crowdsourced data that girls like cats? Maybe none of it works, maybe I’m watching a series of lines whose fluctuations are all within the range of normal, and at last I say, “Okay, we’re done here; would you like some cookies and milk?” And the cookies are homemade because I like to bake—another way in which crowdsourced data on twenty-something bachelors fails to describe me—and I pour M a glass of milk and put two cookies on a plate, oatmeal–chocolate chip, because by eliminating the raisins you can merge the two genres perfectly, and I bring the cookies and milk to M, and she takes a bite, then a sip, and she says, “Thanks, Lincoln, these are really delicious,” but I can hardly hear her voice over the ringing alarm on my seismograph, even though it wouldn’t be a seismograph and they don’t have alarms it makes a better fantasy, and the lines are swerving off the graph because M has fallen in love with me right at that moment, it was the cookies and milk that did it! And now x has a value and the equation can be completed and M is mine, to hell with the rest of that 18 percent, to hell especially with the single member of that 18 percent who is truly, undeniably threatening: namely, M’s boyfriend, Marc.
Why does it feel significant that both their names start with M?
M has been dating Marc for five months, six days, and 2.5 hours, setting the inception of their relationship at the moment Marc walked into her cubicle and asked her to lunch and she said yes. At the six-month mark, they will have a 32 percent chance of taking a more permanent step such as marriage, so I am tracking the days carefully—in part because a permanent step in the relationship between M and Marc will prompt my immediate death. I have no data to back this up, but I’m certain of it.
Knowledge is power, so they say, and yet any counter will tell you that merely possessing data, in itself, is neither useful nor predictive. Does it help me to know that, in the roughly 5.224 months they have been dating, M and Marc have spent the night together approximately one out of three, or 53.07, nights? Assuming that they’re having sex on all of those nights, and twice on, say, half of those nights, it’s likely that they’ve had sex in the neighborhood of 79.6 times. Note that I’ve moved from observations to estimates despite the fact that my cubicle and M’s cubicle share a partition. I made this switch in order to free myself from the need to note whether M and Marc arrive at work together. I have chosen （with Alison’s help） to desist from this particular data collection for two reasons: 1） It was distracting me from the data collection that is my actual job, thus compromising my performance to an extent that prompted my team leader and friend, O’Brien, to speak to me about it twice. 2） Because this data collection was edging me into the role of creepy voyeur.
Last Halloween, M came to work in a teacup costume. It says a lot about a person that she could come to work dressed as a teacup. I wondered whether Marc would come to work dressed in a complementary costume, like a teapot. I spent the morning in a state of frenetic dread, eager to see what Marc would be wearing, yet afraid to see. If he is dressed as a teapot, I thought, I will give up my crusade to win M’s love. But it turned out that Marc wasn’t wearing any costume at all. I became elated when I saw this. It’s over, I thought; there’s no hope for this relationship. Marc cannot understand this teacup-costumed woman.
If I were dating M, I would have come to work dressed as a teapot.