Imagine you're in a cafe, perhaps the noisy one I'm sitting in at this moment. A young woman at a table to your right is typing on her laptop. You turn your head and look at her screen. She surfs the Internet. You watch.

 Hours pass. She reads an online newspaper. You notice that she reads three articles about China. She scouts movies for Friday night and watches the trailer for Kung Fu Panda. She clicks on an ad that promises to connect her to old high school classmates. You sit there taking notes. With each passing minute, you're learning more about her. Now imagine that you could watch 150 million people surfing at the same time. That's more or less what Dave Morgan does.

"What is it about romantic-movie lovers?" Morgan asks, as we sit in his New York office on a darkening summer afternoon. The advertising entrepreneur is flush with details about our ramblings online. He can trace the patterns of our migrations, as if we were swallows or humpback whales, while we move from site to site. Recently he's become intrigued by the people who click most often on an ad for car rentals. Among them, the largest group had paid a visit to online obituary listings. That makes sense, he says, over the patter of rain against the windows. "Someone dies, so you fly to the funeral and rent a car." But it's the second-largest group that has Morgan scratching his head. Romantic-movie lovers. For some reason Morgan can't fathom, loads of them seem drawn to a banner ad for Alamo Rent A Car.

Groundhog Day

Morgan, a cheery 43-year-old, wears his hair pushed to the side, as if when he was young his mother dipped a comb into water, drew it across, and the hair just stayed there. He grew up in Clearfield, a small town in western Pennsylvania a short drive from Punxsutawney. Every year on the second day of February, halfway between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox, a crowd in that town gathers around a large caged rodent still groggy from hibernation. They study the animal's response to its own shadow. According to ancient Celtic lore, that single bit of data tells them whether spring will come quickly or hold off until late March. Morgan has migrated as far as can be from such folk predictions. At his New York startup, Tacoda, he hires statisticians to track our wanderings on the Web and figure out our next moves. Morgan was a pioneer in Internet advertising during the dot-com boom, starting up an agency called 24/7 Real Media. During the bust that followed he founded another company, Tacoda, and moved seamlessly into what he saw as the next big thing: helping advertisers pinpoint the most promising Web surfers for their message.

Tacoda's entire business gorges on data. The company has struck deals with thousands of online publications, from The New York Times  to BusinessWeek. Their sites allow Tacoda to drop a bit of computer code called a cookie into our computers. This lets Tacoda trace our path from one site to the next.

The company focuses on our behavior and doesn't bother finding out our names or other personal details. (That might provoke a backlash concerning privacy.) But Tacoda can still learn plenty. Let's say you visit The Boston Globe and read a column on the Toyota Prius. Then you look at the car section on AOL. Good chance you're in the market for wheels. So Tacoda hits you at some point in your Web wanderings with a car ad. Click on it, and Tacoda gets paid by the advertiser—and gleans one more detail about you in the process. The company harvests 20 billion of these behavioral clues every day.

Sometimes Morgan's team spots groups of Web surfers who appear to move in sync. The challenge then is to figure out what triggers their movements. Once this is clear, the advertisers can anticipate people's online journeys—and sprinkle their paths with just the right ads. This requires research. Take the curious connection between fans of romance movies and the Alamo Rent A Car ad. To come to grips with it, Morgan and his colleagues have to dig deeper into the data. Do car renters arrive in larger numbers from a certain type of romance movie, maybe ones that take place in an exotic locale? Do members of this group have other favorite sites in common? The answers lie in the strings of ones and zeros that our computers send forth. Maybe the statistics will show that the apparent link between movie fans and car renters was just a statistical quirk. Or perhaps Morgan's team will unearth a broader trend, a correlation between romance and travel, lust and wanderlust. That could lead to all kinds of advertising insights. In either case, Morgan can order up hundreds of tests. With each one he can glean a little bit more about us and target the ads with ever more precision. He's taking analysis that once ran through an advertiser's gut, and replacing it with science. We're his guinea pigs—or groundhogs—and we never stop working for him.

Fat Digital Dossiers

When it comes to producing data, we're prolific. Those of us wielding cell phones, laptops, and credit cards fatten our digital dossiers every day, simply by living. Take me. As I write on this spring morning, Verizon, my cell-phone company, can pin me down within several yards of this café in New Jersey. Visa can testify that I'm well caffeinated, probably to overcome the effects of the Portuguese wine I bought last night at 8:19. This was just in time for watching a college basketball game, which, as TiVo might know, I turned off after the first half. Security cameras capture time-stamped images of me near every bank and convenience store.

And don't get me started on my Web wanderings. Those are already a matter of record for dozens of Internet publishers and advertisers around the world. Dave Morgan is just one in a large and curious crowd. Late in the past century, to come up with this level of reporting, the East German government had to enlist tens of thousands of its citizens as spies. Today we spy on ourselves and send electronic updates minute by minute.

This all started with computer chips. Until the 1980s, these bits of silicon, bristling with millions of microscopic transistors, were still a novelty. But they've grown cheaper and more powerful year by year, and now manufacturers throw them into virtually anything that can benefit from a dab of smarts. They power our cell phones, the controls in our cars, our digital cameras, and, of course, our computers. Every holiday season, the packages we open bring more chips into our lives. These chips can record every instruction they receive and every job they do. They're fastidious note takers. They record the minutiae of our lives. Taken alone, each bit of information is nearly meaningless. But put the bits together, and the patterns describe our tastes and symptoms, our routines at work, the paths we tread through the mall and the supermarket. And these streams of data circle the globe. Send a friend a smiley face from your cell phone. That bit of your behavior, that tiny gesture, is instantly rushing, with billions of others, through fiber-optic cables. It's soaring up to a satellite and back down again and checking in at a server farm in Singapore before you've put the phone back in your pocket. With so many bits flying around, the very air we breathe is teeming with motes of information.

If someone could gather and organize these far-flung electronic gestures, our lives would pop into focus. This would create an ever-changing, up-to-the-minute mosaic of human behavior. The prospect is enough to make marketers quiver with excitement. Once they have a bead on our data, they can decode our desires, our fears, and our needs. Then they can sell us precisely what we're hankering for.

Filtering Out the Noise

It sounds a lot simpler than it is. Sloshing oceans of data, from e-mails and porn downloads to sales receipts, create immense chaotic waves. In a single month, Yahoo! alone gathers 110 billion pieces of data about its customers, according to a 2008 study by the research firm comScore. Each person visiting sites in Yahoo's network of advertisers leaves behind, on average, a trail of 2,520 clues. Piece together these details, you might think, and our portraits as shoppers, travelers, and workers would jell in an instant. Summoning such clarity, however, is a slog. When I visit Yahoo's head of research, Prabhakar Raghavan, he tells me that most of the data trove is digital garbage. He calls it "noise" and says that it can easily overwhelm Yahoo's computers. If one of Raghavan's scientists gives an imprecise computer command while trawling through Yahoo's data, he can send the company's servers whirring madly through the noise for days on end. But a timely tweak in these instructions can speed up the hunt by a factor of 30,000. That reduces a 24-hour process to about three seconds. His point is that people with the right smarts can summon meaning from the nearly bottomless sea of data. It's not easy, but they can find us there.

The only folks who can make sense of the data we create are crack mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers. They know how to turn the bits of our lives into symbols. Why is this necessary? Imagine that you wanted to keep track of everything you ate for a year. If you're like I was in the fourth grade, you go to the stationery store and buy a fat stack of index cards. Then, at every meal you write the different foods on fresh cards. Meat loaf. Spinach. Tapioca pudding. Cheerios. After a few days, you have a growing pile of cards. The problem is, there's no way to count or analyze them. They're just a bunch of words. These are symbols too, of course, each one representing a thing or a concept. But they are near impossible to add or subtract, or to drop into a graph illustrating a trend. Put these words in a pile, and they add up to what the specialists call "unstructured data." That's computer talk for "a big mess." A better approach would be to label all the meats with M, all the green vegetables with G, all the candies with C, and so on. Once the words are reduced to symbols, you can put them on a spreadsheet and calculate, say, how many times you ate meat or candy in a given week. Then you can make a graph linking your diet to changes in your weight or the pimple count on your face.

The key to this process is to find similarities and patterns. We humans do this instinctively. It's how we figured out, long ago, which plants to eat and how to talk. But while many of us were focusing on specific challenges, others were thinking more symbolically. I picture early humans sitting around a fire. Some, naturally, are jousting for the biggest piece of meat or busy with mating rituals. But off to the side, a select few are toying with stones, thinking, "If each of these pebbles represents one mammoth, then this rock…." Later, notes Tobias Dantzig in Number: The Language of Science, the Romans used their word calcula, meaning "pebble," to give a name to this thought process. But the pebble was just the start. The essence of calculation was to advance from the physical pebbles to ever-higher realms of abstract reasoning.

That science developed over the centuries, and we now have experts who are comfortable working with ridiculously large numbers, the billions and trillions that the rest of us find either unimaginable or irrelevant. They are heirs to the science that turns our everyday realities into symbols. As the data we produce continue to explode and as computers grow relentlessly stronger, these maestros gain in power. Two of them made a big splash in the late 1990s by founding Google. For the age we're entering, Google is the marquee company. It's built almost entirely upon math, and its very purpose is to help us hunt down data. Google's breakthrough, which transformed a simple search engine into a media giant, was the discovery that our queries—the words we type when we hunt for Web pages—are of immense value to advertisers. The company figured out how to turn our data into money. And lots of others are looking to do the same thing. Data whizzes are pouring into biology, medicine, advertising, sports, politics. They are adding us up. We are being quantified.

When this process began, a half-century ago, the first computers were primitive boxes the size of a garbage truck. They kept their distance from us, purring away in air-conditioned rooms. At this early stage, the complexity of the human animal was too much for them. They couldn't even beat us at chess. But in certain numerical domains, they showed promise. An early test involved consumer credit.

In 1956, two Stanford graduates, a mathematician named Bill Fair and his engineer friend Earl Isaac, came up with the idea of replacing loan officers with a computer. This hulking machine knew practically nothing, not even what the applicants did for a living. It certainly hadn't learned if they'd gotten a raise or filed for divorce. Legions of human loan officers, by contrast, were swimming in data. They often knew the families of the loan applicants. They were acquainted with how much the applicant had struggled in high school and how his engagement had fallen through, probably because of a drinking problem (if he was anything like his uncle). The loan officers had enough details to write sociological monographs, if they were so inclined, about the families in their towns. But they lacked a scientific system to analyze it all. Bankers depended, for the most part, on their gut.

Scores to Quantify Risk

By contrast, the computerized approach zeroed in on only a small set of numbers, most of them concerning bank balances, debts, and payment history. Bare bones. Fair and Isaac built a company to analyze the patterns of those numbers. They developed a way to determine the odds that each customer would default on a loan. Everyone got a number. These risk scores proved to be much better predictors than the gut-trusting humans. Most borrowers with high credit scores made good on their loans. And more people qualified for them. The machine, after all, didn't discriminate on the basis of anything but numbers. It was equal-opportunity banking. Like a lot of analytical systems, it was fairer. Its narrow scope, paradoxically, returned broad-minded results. What's more, a lot of people turned out to be better bets than the loan officers suspected. The market for credit expanded.

Still, the computer knew its place. It thrived in the world of numbers, and it stayed there. Those of us who specialized in words and music and images barely noticed it. Yet over the following decades, the computer grew in power, gobbling up ever more ones and zeros per millisecond. It got cheaper and smaller, and it linked up with others around the world. It produced jaw-dropping efficiencies. And from the viewpoint of the humanities crowd (including this history major), it swallowed entire technologies. It supplanted typewriters and moved on, like an imperial force, to rout record players and film cameras. It took over the mighty telephone. Finally, in the 1990s, even those of us who had long viewed computers as aliens from the basement world of geekdom started to make room for them in our homes and offices. We learned that we could use these machines to share our words and movies and photos with the entire world.

In fact, we had little choice. The old ways were laughably slow. But there was one condition: We had to render everything we sent, the very stuff of our lives, into ones and zeros. That's how we came to deliver our riches, the key to communications on earth, to the masters of the symbolic language. Now these mathematicians and computer scientists are in a position to rule the information of our lives. I call them the Numerati.

Adapted from The Numerati by Stephen Baker, copyright ©2008. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co. All rights reserved.

 As Franco Died           

Paloma was working on this expression back in 1975, when General Franco was dying. She'd close her eyes halfway and shake her head slowly, as if considering a point and finding it too pitiful for words. John Lewis first noticed it in the basement café of the Arts and Letters Department, la Facultad. She was down there with her philosophy friends, drinking espressos and smoking Ducados, probably talking about the horrors of Pinochet in Chile or the latest American outrage, maybe the tacky McDonalds near the Plaza de España. Then suddenly she closed those dark green eyes halfway and tried that headshake, exhaling a lungful of smoke as she did it. John remembered wondering who the hell she was imitating.
Now he saw the same expression, refined through 20 years of practice. It was a thin, angular Paloma on Larry King Live, talking in English about her political action committee and the importance of returning to traditional American values (Paloma? American?). Then Larry asked her something about President Clinton. The eyes closed, the head shook, the mouth, barely open, was surely going through the motion of exhaling, though she probably gave up cigarettes long ago. She had it down, John thought. He pulled his chair close to the TV to see if she still had the same crooked front tooth.
Funny how the memory worked. John supposed there were entire years in the '80s that he didn't think of Paloma. Months at least. In airports sometimes he'd hear a Spanish voice shouting some typically Spanish word, like "imbécil," pronouncing the "c" with the Castilian "th", and he'd remember her. Sometimes he saw elegant curved noses like hers, and he wondered if she'd cut her long black hair, if she'd ever married. But in his postings in Quito and Managua and Cabo Verde, noses like Paloma's were rare as fresh bagels; months passed between sightings. In Washington, of course, they were more common. John's upstairs neighbor, K. Swartz -- Kitty, Katie? -- was a man-sized bureaucrat at one of the Departments, either Interior or HUD, who thumped against John's door when carrying groceries upstairs. His first few months at the apartment, John routinely mistook the banging for knocking, and opened the door a few times, only to find himself face to face with a large, apologizing figure in a purple parka. With her brown eyes and red hair, an accent from Philadelphia or Baltimore, his neighbor couldn't have seemed less Spanish. Her nose, though, was a graceful, slender arch. Pure Paloma.
These days, John didn't have to conjure Paloma from random words and body parts. The real Paloma was speaking to him all the time, from TV, the Post's Style section, even some of the magazines in supermarket checkout lines. She had married an American publishing heir, dropped her two surnames, Ruiz Goicoechea, and emerged as Paloma Pollack, the foreign-born goddess of the new right. John first saw her about two months before in The Wall Street Journal. The article described a glamorous Spaniard with a doctorate in philosophy from the Sorbonne who had followed a path of her husband's money right to the summit of the Republican Party. Nowadays she was sailing in Long Island Sound with William Buckley and showing up at fundraisers on the arm of right-wing senators and pundits. People compared her to Claire Boothe Luce, even to Jackie Kennedy.
Something about Paloma's spectacular flight left John feeling angry and unsettled. At first he blamed the politics. He looked at this glib new philosopher of the right, with sculpted cheekbones he'd never seen in Spain, and wondered just how low she would dive for money and fame. Following his daily routines in Washington, taking the subway, shopping at Pathway, eating alone in the State Department cafeteria, he carried on imaginary debates with her, positioning himself as a poor but virtuous leftist, and ripping into her as a shill for cattlemen, oil companies, even racists. In one of the debates he got a bit carried away and called her a "whore." She slapped him in the face and called him "hijo de la chingada" -- a Mexicanism Paloma would never use. John revised the scenario and pointed out her hypocrisy more delicately. This reduced Paloma to tears. "I know, I know," she lamented in accented English, sounding like Ingrid Bergman. "Mightn't there be some way," she ventured, "that we could use these millions, together, for something worthwhile, something we'd be proud of?"
John pictured himself shaking his head slowly, with dignity, and then asking if she acquired those cheekbones through diet or surgery. More tears. Paloma telling him about the long years of therapy that followed his departure from Madrid. The anorexia, the surgery. In this scenario, John consoled her with a pat on one newly hollowed cheek. "Whatever you do," he advised, "don't let them touch your nose."
Now that he was growing used to the new Paloma, the politics hardly fazed him. He'd always regarded her politics as a fashion statement. Socialism, platform shoes, Roxy Music, hash... They were all part of the university package in Madrid that year, when the Generalísimo kept getting sicker. Back then, with helmeted soldiers guarding the door of the Facultad, politics were just something to talk about, in hushed tones -- and even quieter if you were working for the bomb-throwing Basques, the ETA. Now, John regarded her shift from ETA-sympathizing socialist to Republican as simply a matter of keeping up with the times, like a dentist who switches from silver to ceramic fillings. In fact, John himself had wandered politically. Who would have thought back in 1975, when Franco and Pinochet and Somoza all appeared to be members of the same fascist club, that John 10 years later would be organizing the "contras" from his political post in the Managua Embassy? In his imaginary dialogues with Paloma in the mid '80s, she was the one attacking from the left.
So they were both hypocrites, unless Paloma had experienced some sort of yacht-deck epiphany, which John doubted. What irked him, he realized after a week or two, was her stunning success. It begged a comparison, and John, at 41, had little to brag about. Back in Madrid, he'd been the ambitious one, the good student who wrote synopses of Borges and García Márquez, in Spanish, on those empty pages at the back of the books. He was the one headed for law school in America and maybe politics, or a career in high diplomacy. Maybe he'd write books. Paloma? She flitted around with those ragged philosophy friends of hers in oversized black sweaters, smoking, ordering cognac with the espressos in the cafeteria at the Facultad. John could remember her flunking an Unamuno seminar -- flunking it! -- and then shrugging and blowing out smoke, calling the course a “coñazo," a lewd word for boring. John could remember her joking about it with all those friends of hers, the guys with the half-grown beards and the eyes at half-mast, as if they'd been out in the gardens smoking hash, or up all night fucking. Or both. When he walked up to her table that day, looking concerned, and asked if it was true she'd failed the test, those people made him feel like the Joe College, the earnest American who actually cared about grades. Paloma performed her shrugging routine and gave him every possible signal to take his concern and his L.L. Bean sweater and neatly combed long hair to an American table. That was when John started thinking maybe she was sleeping with one of those guys.
Now John wondered whether at that moment in the Facultad café, Paloma was pronouncing him -- perhaps for the first time -- a "dweeb." Back then he didn't even know the word. But maybe as he made the decision to retreat from that table, choosing not to mix it up with that cynical bunch of Spaniards, not to laugh and agree that the course was a coñazo and that grades didn't matter, and not to take the even gutsier approach, to tell them they were full of shit. Maybe this retreat charted his course for the next 20 years. From Bloomington through all his postings in the foreign service, John had been following a strict course of dweebish non-intervention. He'd hardly mixed it up with anyone. There was a Peruvian woman he danced with one evening in Lima who squeezed him tight and kissed him softly on the neck. When she asked politely for his phone number, he made one up. And then once while waiting drunk for a bus in Caracas he found himself kissing a woman. But when her bus came, she said goodbye and waved to him from the back window. Now it seemed like a dream. So while Paloma was busy tangling with people, getting bruised and muddied, and using them to climb, John was avoiding potential messes.
Not that he didn't have his pride. He looked at himself at 41, with his flat stomach and graying temples, a face with some nice angles to it, and he liked what he saw. He was proud of his knowledge, his taste in jazz, his political savvy. People appreciated his humor. But his romantic life was at best a decimal. Just a couple of weeks before, he heard a secretary at Foggy Bottom laugh quietly into the phone, calling someone a "dweeb." The way she lowered her voice when she said it, looking at him through the corner of an eye, made him worry she was talking about him. The thought mortified him.
That's when he resolved to make use of Paloma. He pictured her, much pudgier back then, scrunched into the backseat of that deux chavaux, pulling her skirt up and murmuring, "¡Qué frío que hace!" Now, at 40, that same woman had turned into something of a sex symbol in America, at least for the Washington crowd. This left John facing a singular challenge: How to let people know, discreetly -- without bragging or name-dropping -- that he and Paloma used to be an item that year that Franco was dying. And, more important for John's battered self esteem, that he'd had sex with her.
Since then, he'd raised the matter a few times at work. But his State Department colleagues were so tuned into politics, it was hard to steer them toward sex. One day, he saw Luis Bravo, of the Brazil desk, reading a Wall Street Journal article in the cafeteria. It was something about Republican fund-raising, and had a dot portrait of Paloma halfway down the column. "Funny thing," John said, as if the thought had just occurred to him. "You see that woman, this Paloma... Pollack?" He reached across the table and put a finger on Paloma's picture, leaving a smudge on it.
Bravo took a bite from a leg of fried chicken and nodded.
"I used to date her, in Madrid. Twenty years ago."
Bravo looked at John blankly. John figured he was probably wondering just how to ask about sex.
"Back when Franco was dying," John explained. "For a few months."
Bravo nodded and wadded his chicken in one cheek, to talk. "Franco was dying for more than a few months."
"I mean I dated Paloma for a few months," John said, already regretting bringing it up.
"Was she a... Fascist back then?" Bravo asked.
"No," John laughed. "Closer to a Basque terrorist."
"Hmmm. Looks like she's going to endorse Dole one of these days."
This wasn't going anywhere. John piled some cole slaw on a piece of toast and took a bite. "Really quite a beautiful girl," he said. "Confused as hell, but beautiful."
Bravo nodded and turned the page. John wondered if bureaucratic routines at Foggy Bottom were grounding down people's curiosity. He tried bringing it up a few more times. But everyone focused on her politics. Maybe, he thought, they just didn't know him well enough to ask the kind of personal questions he wanted so badly to answer. Rosa, the secretary at the Central America Desk, came closer than anyone else. "She's a very ... swank woman," she said. "Have you called her?"
John said no, not yet anyway, and walked back to his desk wondering if "swank" was a word. He'd have to look it up.
Watching Paloma on TV, he realized that he'd forgotten to look up the word. That was the afternoon the deputy chief of mission in Paraguay read his political file on labor unions, and called up for clarifications. Then John had to brief the assistant undersecretary on Bolivia and Ecuador, bring him up to speed for an Andean meeting in Cuzco.
What other country in the world would let a foreigner play domestic politics like this? There was Paloma, running a hand through her thick, shoulder-length hair, calling the president "spineless." Asked about his Bosnia policy she made that face again -- the eyes closed, the head shaking -- and finally selected a word for it: hypocritical. "We Europeans know something about duplicity," she said, citing Tallyrand and Machiavelli. "But to wrap himself in such a blanket of virtue..." She started to repeat the gesture, but cut it short and said, "This time I honestly think he's inhaling."
John remembered smoking hash with Paloma. One of her Basque friends had sneaked in from Morocco with it and he gave Paloma a piece about as big as a chicklet, wrapped in tin foil. One evening in October, she and John were walking from the University to the Moncloa metro stop. They were just flirting at this point, John remembered, doing the double-cheek-kiss routine to say hello and good-bye. His Spanish wasn't very good yet, and she spent a lot of time correcting him, and laughing about his mistakes. On a whim, John had taken a couple semesters of Hungarian at Bloomington, and Paloma liked to hear him speak it. They developed a game. Sometimes when they passed policemen, or one of the armed soldiers posted around the university, John would raise his voice and start waving his arms, sprinking words like "Franco", "Generalísimo" and "falange" into Hungarian sentences he remembered, such as "My dog is brown" and "I am fine, thank you, and you?" Paloma would look up at him, nodding earnestly, and then, when they were past the bewildered policemen, break into a high, whinnying laugh. John could still hear her, laughing until she coughed, and feel her grabbing his elbow, hugging it to her chest. Sometimes she turned towards him and held his face in her hands, and then brushed his long brown hair across his forehead, or traced his eyebrows with a finger. John had slept with a couple of women by this point in his life. But none had touched so much, or so casually, as Paloma.
That evening she pulled him by the elbow just at the entrance to the Metro and said, in English, "How about a walk in the Parque del Oeste?" John thought she wanted sex and agreed. They made their way down the slope of the dry, barren park, which looked to John like a goat pasture. Paloma hunched down in the shadow of some bush and began to burrow through her purse. She pulled out the square of hash and a Ducado. "You don't have a Winston?" she asked, saying that good "canutos" were made with blond tobacco. John, disappointed that she wanted drugs, and not sex, shook his head. He looked up towards the traffic on Avenida Moncloa, and across the park toward the palace of the Borbón kings. There just had to be policemen patrolling this park, he thought.
Just a few weeks before, the whole junior-year-abroad delegation had made a pilgrimage to the American Embassy, where a stern young woman showed them poster-sized pictures of Americans in jail on drug charges. She also warned them about politics. "You have no political rights here, no free speech, no right to assembly." She went on and on about what a repressive place Spain was, and finally asked if there were any questions. A latter-day beatnic from Wisconsin -- John could remember his ponytail and goatee, but not his name -- raised his hand and said, "If nobody has any rights around here, why are we, like, so tight with Franco?" That got a laugh. But the diplomat matter-of-factly mentioned the quid pro quo, the American air base at Torrejón, the Navy base at Rota. And she added that sports fans could listen to pro football and the World Series on Armed Forces Radio.
As Paloma rolled the joint, John was on all fours behind the bush, looking for police. "Shouldn't we do this inside someplace?" he asked in his halting Spanish.
Paloma had a pile of the dark Ducado tobacco on one of her notebooks. She was carefully grinding the hash into in, and then packing the mixture back into the cigarette. "Don't be such a burro," she snapped. "They wouldn't recognize this if they found it in their chocolate con churros."
"But they might recognize it" -- John wrestled for a moment with the past subjunctive -- "if they came upon two students smoking it behind a very small bush."
"Then come on!" Paloma stood up and lighted the lumpy, reconstituted Ducado, took a deep pull on it, and began walking toward the Avenida Moncloa. John hurried to his feet and trotted after her.
He didn't like that image of himself running to catch up to Paloma. Looking back, from his study in Arlington, he pictured himself hunching to brush the dirt from the knees of his khakis, brushing his long hair from his eyes, following this woman without as much as a whimper, even if it landed him in a Spanish jail. All this just to smoke hash, which he never liked, especially mixed with harsh black tobacco. He smoked it that night, though, walking past the crowded shops of Argüelles, and past the traffic cops, exchanging the canuto with Paloma. He remembered looking at it as a game of musical chairs: whoever was holding the cigarette when they got busted would go to jail.
That night, Paloma's laugh whinnied higher than ever, and when she grabbed his arm, she clenched it tight to her green pea coat. They took the Metro all the way out to Alfonso XIII, to the Cineteca. But the Godard movie showing was sold out. Instead, they sat in a little bar, Paloma drinking beers and eating tapas, probably chunks of Spanish tortilla, or maybe anchovies, and John soothing his aching throat with chamomille tea. He hadn't known the word for chamomille and improvised, saying "camamilla." But even as he said it, he knew it was terribly wrong, coming out like "bed of mine." Paloma shrieked with laughter, repeating "cama mía," as the waiter stood there in his dirty white jacket, probably wondering if she was laughing at him. Finally Paloma looked at him and said, "Manzanilla, una taza de manzanilla," pronouncing the Zs with the Castillian Th. Then, done giggling, she repeated it a few times for John. Looking at her leaning across the table, her frank, bloodshot eyes staring at him, John had a feeling that with a little initiative on his part, they'd have sex. The only problem was logistics. He couldn't very well take her back to his apartment near the Glorieta de Bilbao, where he lived with an old Spanish couple. They couldn't do it behind that bush in the Parque del Oeste. He remembered formulating a proposition in his hash-addled brain as she told him about her family, her Jewish father, a professor, and her Basque mother, and her little brother, Pepe, who didn't think about much more than the Real Madrid football team. Maybe they could get a car somehow, John was thinking, or visit a cheap hotel in Lavapies, near the flea market. But as the hash high gave way to a headache, he escorted her wordlessly down the Paseo de la Castellana, and left her at the door of the majestic apartment building, planting little dry kisses on both cheeks.
The Larry King show was over. John turned off the TV and walked to the kitchenette looking down at his stomach, wondering if it was as flat as it used to be back in Madrid. Maybe not. He made himself a ham and cheese sandwich, using dijon mustard instead of mayonnaise, and opened a Michelob. What was it, he wondered, that led Paloma to the top while he was still schlepping around a bureaucracy, looking for an excuse to tell people about his brush with fame? She was gorgeous, for one thing. That didn't hurt. But John himself was a fairly hot number in the mid-70s, once you got past that ugly haircut. He remembered all the attention some of the American girls lavished on him. There was this one girl, Pat Donaldson, who yanked him by the elbow in the hallway, right after the Art in the Prado lecture. She backed him into a little nook by a bulletin board and whispered urgently that he was the best-looking guy in the program, and that she had to have him. Pat was a blonde, a little heavy, actually pretty fat. She laughed a lot and had a sparky Wisconsin accent, which made her sound like a chipmunk. Her Spanish was miserable. But still, the Spanish guys paid a lot of attention to her, which was new for her. She was screwing them more or less continually, and bragging about it. Thinking back, John realized that this fact cheapened the compliment she paid him. But something about the way she looked at him, and the breathless way she spoke, made him believe, even now, that she found him very sexy.
Should he call Paloma? Say hi? He thought about it for a few minutes, finishing his sandwich and then opening another beer. He'd have to say something, propose something, wouldn't he? Like getting together for a drink near DuPont Circle, or maybe on Capitol Hill. And then what would he tell her? That he was a bureaucrat with one eye on his pension plan, and that her politics disgusted him? Perhaps if he kept quiet about her politics, or even tacitly endorsed them, she could find him some kind of job, maybe in the White House.
He thought about that for a while. What if she reached across the coffee table and grabbed his arm, just like the old days, and said she just had to have him? He pictured her lying back in a dark-windowed limousine -- no cramped deux chavaux this time -- wearing nothing but a mink stole, looking up at him with those green eyes half closed, her tongue running over that crooked front tooth.
John called Maryland information and asked for Paloma Pollack. No listing. Alexander Pollack? Ditto. He'd have to dig around to find the number.
He wondered how she'd remember him. She'd certainly recall those  afternoons in the Cafe Gijon, sitting at a table littered with papers and books, and John introducing her to the Latin American novelists, to Cortazar and Fuentes, even as he was having to look up three or four words every page. She found it amusing. As he talked to her about Rulfo's magical realism and Carpentier's baroque style, John had a feeling he was on a stage, auditioning for her. And even if he managed to pass the test, sex itself would be another pass-fail exam. He always suspected that no matter how he performed with Paloma, she'd be smirking with those friends of hers at the Facultad about her friend, the Yanqui. One time, John recalled, she brought along one of her small dour friends, Manolo, to the Cafe Gijón. He had a crush on her, John could tell. It was as if Paloma had set up a duel. Manolo attacked first, ripping into John for Vietnam and racism and McCarthyism... the usual complaints. Manolo was Andalusian, from Seville, and John had trouble understanding his rapid-fire Spanish, which sounded almost Cuban. But he sat and smiled, nodding occasionally, looking concerned when he thought it appropriate, raising his eyebrows at Paloma, from time to time, as if to say, "Your friend's a passionate one, isn't he?" Finally, when Manolo put a Ducado in his mouth and asked for a light, John put together an answer. Speaking very softly, he said: "If I understand you, your arguments, you say that you live under Fascist rule largely because my Fascist government supports your Fascist government, as part of its own imperial designs, no?" The Spaniard nodded nervously and looked at Paloma, who was watching them both, bemused, over the rim of her coffee cup. "If we both live under Fascist rule," John continued, "then there is no place for blame. We are victims of a similar system, and our only choices are to commiserate or rebel, no?" That seemed to defuse Manolo. He abandoned the café a few minutes later, heading toward the Prado with his books, and leaving John with his bill. John remembered a feeling of victory, and perhaps the first triumph of his diplomatic career.
By then it was getting colder in Madrid, and darker. John walked Paloma home, down the Castellana, past the kiosks brimming with the latest news on the Generalísimo. Grave. Peor. Sufre. He remembered seeing the vendors cooking fragrant chestnuts over oil-drums, and asking Paloma if she wanted some. "They smell better than they taste," she said, smiling. A few blocks later, as John walked along holding a paper cone full of chestnuts, trying to figure out how to eat them, Paloma brought up the discussion with her friend. "You know, you tied Manolo into knots. But you didn't say anything," she said gravely.
John shrugged. "That's politics, no?"
It was dark when they reached her apartment building. Emboldened by his political victory, John tried to move the kiss from the cheeks to the lips. But Paloma swung her face away from him, whipping his extended lips with her hair. "Pssst. The neighbors!" she said.
"What about the neighbors?"
"Shhhhh," she said quietly, pursing lips that John wanted so badly to kiss. "You don't understand." As he walked away, humiliated, still holding the chestnuts, she called after him, "Don't look for the answers in Mexican novels, Juanito."
That was the Paloma now conquering America: imperious, teasing, smug. John found himself hating her. He walked around his apartment with a bottle of Michelob in one hand, a copy of Orwell's Homage to Catalonia in the other. Thinking about Paloma soured him on Spain. He put down the book and picked up the Post. He paged through the entertainment section, looking for strip clubs. He saw one called "Stiffy's," which struck him funny. Maybe he'd go. But what if someone from work saw him going in? John sat down in the living room with the paper in his lap and took another drink of beer.
That evening after Paloma teased him, John did some teasing of his own. He called the señora at his house and told her he wouldn't be home for supper. Then he took the metro at Rios Rosas, switched at Cuatro Caminos, and came up at Argüelles, just across the street from the Parque del Oeste. The stores were closing. He could hear the music from a discotheque, a block away -- "Voulez vous coucher avec moi, ce soir?" -- and he was convinced it was talking to him. He crossed the avenue purposefully and made his way down the row of tall, dingy dormitories, Los Colegios Mayores. He found Pat Donaldson in the basement café of her dorm. She was drinking Té de manzanilla and reading some book of Spanish poetry, probably Machado. When she saw John, she hurried over to kiss on both cheeks, pressing much closer to the mouth than Paloma had. "Want to go out dancing?" she asked, before he could say a word.
He remembered trying to focus that evening on Pat's face, which was very pretty, and not on her large body. They sat in that café, talking about the art course they took together. Pat couldn't wait to get past the medieval stuff they were studying, the Hispano-Flamenco and the Maestro de las Mil Virgenes, and start on Goya and Velazquez. John nodded, thinking about little but sex. Finally they went up to her room. She held him tight by the elbow as they climbed the stairs, and whispered something to him about her period. John was more relieved than disappointed to see that Pat's roommate was there. "Well, I've got to go," he said, kissing her on both cheeks. She tried to get him to stay, to wait a while. Things could be worked out. But he shook his head and heaved his book pack over a shoulder. Pat, though, didn't give up so easily. "A group of us are going to Segovia this weekend," she said. "You want to come?" John, anxious to leave on good terms with her, said yes. He kissed her again, this time almost getting the corners of her mouth. She pulled him close. Then he broke free, hurrying down the hall, down the steps, out into the cool November night.
That was the night Franco died. It was dark when John woke up the next morning. He crept into the kitchen, as usual, trying not to wake up the señora, and turned on the gas for his shower. Waiting for it to heat up the water, he flipped on the radio. He heard a classical dirge and then a man's voice announced that the general “falleció" at 2 a.m. John thought he knew what this meant. But he scampered into his room to look up "fallecer," just to be sure. The dictionary left no doubt. He looked out the window, half expecting to see explosions of some kind, mortars, the first battle of a renewed civil war. But the street watchman, "el sereno," was huddled as usual in the doorway of the shoe store, and a few early-risers were walking, as usual, toward the Bilbao metro. He heard the señora shouting to him that he left on the gas. John hurried toward the shower, telling the señora on the way that the Generalísimo "falleció."
"Ay, no me diga," she said, crossing the front of her nightgown.
John nodded somberly. If the señora was 70 now, he thought, she’d been 30 when Franco marched his troops up from Morocco, starting the civil war. He tried to imagine Gerald Ford as president until the year... 2014? The señora started to cry, murmuring something about "pobrecito." Then she crossed herself again, said, "Qué en paz descanse," and told John to hurry with the shower.
That frosty morning he walked all the way to the university, expecting to see something momentous. But except for some black crepe hanging from public buildings and the banner headlines on newspapers, he was disappointed. Cafés did the usual business, buses ran. Construction workers at Cuatro Caminos warmed themselves with red wine and brandy. But when he reached the university, he found armed soldiers standing at closed gates. Classes, they said, were postponed for a week.
He started to head home when he heard some honking. It was Paloma, her friend Pilar, and two young men -- Manolo and one other -- in an old car. They were all beaming, paying no attention to the soldiers. Paloma leaned out a window and told John they were heading to San Sebastian for a week. They'd already swung by his house to invite him, and learned from a teary-eyed señora that he'd walked to school. Didn't he want to come? John looked into the crowded car, a deux chevaux, and wondered where he'd fit. He hesitated. "Come on," Paloma urged him, telling him she had cousins to stay with up there. Pilar told him to jump in. Even Manolo, who had seemed so sullen at the Café Gijon, urged him on. He told John they'd be driving through the Rioja region, and would drink plenty of the best red wine. He held up a boot-shaped wineskin and smiled broadly, exposing a row of crooked teeth. John was paralyzed. He said he didn't have any clothes with him. But Manolo said his house was on the way. John asked how long the drive was. What's it matter? Paloma said. Fifteen, twenty hours. John wondered about the sleeping arrangements. He pictured himself lying awake in an attic as Paloma slept with Manolo. But leaning out the car window in a big wool sweater, flushed and radiant, Paloma was going on about what a great fun they'd all have. They'd see the cathedrals in Leon and Burgos, the wine country in Rioja, the Pyrenees. "And we can even stop in Segovia for lunch today," she said. "See the aqueduct and eat suckling pig. It's so tender, they say, you can cut it with the plate." Manolo laughed and added that "cochinillo" was delicious with Rioja wine.
Then John remembered. "Oh," he said, looking disappointed. "I forgot. I'm supposed to go to Segovia this weekend, with friends."
"Cancel," Paloma said matter-of-factly.
"I...I can't."
Paloma shrugged, looking hurt. "Oh well," she said. "Maybe some other time."
Manolo put the wineskin back under his seat. Even he looked disappointed. "Hombre..." he said.
"No, no," John said, waving them on.
The car finally pulled away, toward Argüelles. Paloma looked back one more time.
As John pictured the scene 20 years later, he tried to read her expression. More than angry or sad or betrayed, she looked perplexed.
John often regretted his decision. Looking back, he saw that Paloma and her friends were celebrating a new beginning, the first political change in their lives. What better way to celebrate than a road trip?
John ended up traveling to Segovia as a member of Pat Donaldson's entourage. When he met her at the bus station, she was already sitting with another American, a studious engineer from Purdue named Greg. It turned out she'd arranged to meet yet another American in Segovia. John, it seemed, had given up the trip to San Sebastian for a place in a line of lonely, horny ex-pats. When they got to Segovia, Greg walked next to Pat most of the time, and John tagged along behind, as if he didn't care. Luckily, they never ran into the other American. But Pat did find a Spaniard with a car. John remembered sitting in the back seat with Greg as the Spaniard, his name long forgotten, drove recklessly through the brown prairies, pointing out things to Pat. She grabbed his hand and rubbed it, saying, "Verdad? Verdad?" in her miserable Wisconsin accent. That night they somehow managed to sneak into the same hotel room. But just as John and Greg were readying to negotiate sleeping arrangements, the Spaniard knocked on the door. So the amenable Americans lay on blankets on the floor, pretending to sleep, while Pat fucked the Spaniard. In the middle of the night, the Spaniard woke up with a start. He dressed loudly, hopping near John's head as he pulled on socks, and hurried out of the room. As soon as he was gone, Greg rose like a zombie and crept wordlessly into bed with Pat, and the humping began again. John tried not to watch too much.
What would have happened, he wondered, looking back 20 years, if he had demanded his turn? Would Greg have returned to the floor? It was a question that never came up, probably because all of them could tell that John wasn't the kind of guy who would get up from the floor. Even as John spent long hours speculating about his own future, what kind of woman he would end up with, everyone else had him down as a dweeb, for life. That's why Manolo had been so friendly! John had never considered this before, and it depressed him. He walked into the kitchen for another beer.
As he opened the last Michelob, he heard a thumping from upstairs, then some shouts. A chair falling over? Then a door slammed and someone pounded down the stairs. He braced himself, beer in hand, hoping that his neighbor would keep running down the stairs, past his door. But she stopped and banged. "Mr. Lewis!" she shouted. "Fire!"
John opened the door and saw his neighbor for the first time without her purple coat. She was standing wild-eyed in a grey sweatsuit, red hair he'd never noticed falling down to her shoulders, yelling something about a fire extinguisher. John ran to the kitchen and grabbed a small red unit by the refrigerator and ran up the stairs after her into a smoke-filled apartment. The TV was on, playing for an idle exercise bike. "In here!" she shouted from the kitchen. John hurried in and saw a plastic trash can lying on its side in the middle of the floor, burning. "Shoot it!" the woman screamed as John tried to read the instructions. Something about pulling a pin out..."Shoot it, Goddamn it!" He saw a plastic pole. That must be the pin. He grabbed it between his thumb and forefinger and pulled. "Give it to me!" she yelled. John swung away from her, to keep control of the extinguisher, and looked at the pin. He was pulling the wrong way. He gave it a yank in the other direction and it came out. Then he calmly pointed the apparatus at the fire, which was melting the garbage can, sending inky threads of petrochemicals toward the ceiling. "Fuck!" she yelled. He pulled the trigger and a blanket of white powder buried the flame with a whoosh.
Silence. Then John could hear some popping and crackling from the remains of the fire. The coat of white powder seemed to hiss. He heard canned laughter from the TV in the living room, and he could hear the large woman next to him breathing heavily.  What was her name? Kitty? That didn't seem to fit such a large woman. She was still staring at the remains of the fire and listening to it. "It's sorta like it's talking, isn't it," she finally said, looking up at John and smiling.
"Kind of like Rice Krinkles," he said.
"Or Krispy Kritters."
They both laughed.
"I'm sorry I screamed at you," she said. "But I was thinking, here's my kitchen burning down, and this guy, he's like, reading the goddamned directions."
"It had this pin in it..." John started to explain.
"Listen," she said, her voice brightening. "Would you like a beer or something?" She stepped over the remains of the trash can and opened the refrigerator door. "I got some white wine in here too. And Stolichnaya vodka in the freezer if you want something..."
"No thanks."
John started to back away. But he stopped when he saw the smile drop from her face. "Well, I guess I could have something..." he said. "You have some lime or lemon for that vodka?"
It turned out her name was Katie. She moved the exercise bike and installed John in an easy chair near the TV, with a tall glass of vodka on the rocks, and hurried off to take a shower. By the time she came back, dressed in jeans and a blue blouse, and the red hair tied up in back with a ribbon, John had worked his way through half his drink and was having a very hard time concentrating on what appeared to be a hospital soap opera on TV. It seemed to jump around so much, from one character to the next. Even the picture seemed to bounce.
Katie sat on the couch with a big glass of white wine. She grabbed the remote control and starting switching the channels, confusing John even more. She settled back on the hospital show and turned up the volume. John sipped his vodka and looked at her. The nose. It really was like Paloma's. But her face was half again as broad, with rosy cheeks, and deep-set brown eyes. Something serious was happening on the hospital show, and her eyebrows were knotted with concern. She took a big sip of wine and swallowed it without removing her gaze from the screen. She was actually pretty, John said, once you got past her size. He figured she was at least six feet tall, and probably pushing 175 pounds.
Commercials came on. Katie muted them and swung around toward John and told him about herself. In short order, she managed to let him know that she was 37, divorced, originally from Philadelphia, and still with some friends there -- though her ex-husband was there, too, which was a downer. She worked three floors down from Bruce Babbit at Interior, she said, and made it clear that she wasn't a big admirer of Newt Gingrich. She didn't like Clinton too much either, but would probably vote him. She said she didn't especially enjoy TV, especially the Thursday night line-up. Just then the hospital show came back on, and she un-muted it.
John emptied his vodka glass and tried to look at the TV. The picture seemed to jump around even more. Now he had trouble understanding what the people were saying. He looked at Katie. Something about her reminded him of someone. Was it that woman he kissed at the bus stop in Caracas? Or was it just that she was wearing Paloma's nose?
He cleared his throat to say something. She looked at him. "You need a refill?" He started to say no, that he'd had enough. But just then the commercials came on and Katie, working against the clock, grabbed his glass and hurried into the kitchen. He heard her unloading an ice tray and pouring. "You know, I guess I should do something about this trash can," she yelled. "I can't like just, leave it here. Smoldering, or whatever it's doing."
Commercials were still on when she got back. "Tell me about yourself," she said, handing him the drink. "I hardly see you, except when I bump into your door in that ridiculously small landing there..."
John didn't know where to start. So he told her about himself and Paloma. He told her how they met at the Facultad, about how Franco was dying and it seemed that everything was headed for radical change, even civil war. Katie listened intently, keeping the TV on mute, even as the hospital show ended and the local news came on. John told her that long before Paloma was a friend of Newt Gingrich, she was a socialist of sorts, who smoked hash that her friends brought up from Morocco. He told her about walking past the cops talking Hungarian.
"My folks are Hungarian!" Katie said, nodding intently.
"You're kidding."
"No. But go on."
Fueled by the vodka, John was content to keep on talking. He enjoyed listening to his own sentences, his touches of Madrid color and history. He was a good story teller, he thought, when he put his mind to it. But he could see that Katie was waiting for this relationship he was describing to flower into love, or at least something in that realm. If he ended the story with that sad little scene where he refused the ride to San Sebastian, she'd most likely turn her attention back to the TV. So he changed a few things in his head and kept talking. He told her about the day Franco died, how he walked to the University and found it closed, and how Paloma and her friends pulled up next to him in that ancient Citroen and asked him if he wanted to go with them. To Segovia. Naturally, he hopped in.
That night they ate very tender suckling pig, and washed it down with red wine. Rioja.
Katie shook her head. She hadn't heard of Rioja.
Just a detail, John said. But if she ever went to Spain, she should keep it in mind. "It's sort of oaky."
Anyway, afterwards, the four of them walked around the city. They looked at the aqueduct, which the Romans had actually constructed, some 2,000 years earlier, without even using mortar.
"They used rocks," Katie said, nodding, eager to get back to the romance.
"Uh huh. Big stones."
After the walk, they headed back to the hotel.
As he told the story, John saw that by putting all the other people in the car, he'd undermined the romantic connection between himself and Paloma. By this point, though, there wasn't much he could do about it.
They walked up one of Segovia's steep cobblestone streets toward the castle. They found a little Pension, and somehow they managed to sneak into the same room. "We probably wouldn't have dared do that if we hadn't been drinking so much wine," he said.
Katie nodded, anxious to hear how the young Paloma Pollack would handle these three hot-blooded men in her hotel room.
Paloma made it clear that she wanted to sleep with John, and John alone, John said. But he was shy back then, and felt uncomfortable about the whole affair. He couldn't really be in the same room with these other two guys, but he didn't want to kick them out. So, magnanimously, he suggested that all three men sleep on blankets on the floor, leaving the bed for Paloma alone. The other two agreed. They all went to sleep. Next thing John knew, one of them was up in the bed with Paloma, having sex. Very loud, passionate sex.
Katie leaned forward. "Did you... just watch?"
"I probably shouldn't have," John said. "But yeah, I did, a little." He told her that Paloma was much bigger back then -- almost fat, he noticed, seeing her naked for the first time.
As John told the story, he could guess that Katie was expecting some sort of orgy. But even with all the vodka, he just couldn't deliver one. They finally fell asleep, he said. Then the guy in bed woke up with a start and hurried out of the room, swearing in Spanish.
"But didn't he come with you, in the car, from Madrid?" Katie asked.
"Yeah, he did. But I guess he had some sort of appointment or something..."
At this point in the story, John considered putting himself in the bed with Paloma. He found it very hard, though, to change the story. "Next thing I know," he said, "the guy next to me's getting up, like a zombie, and crawling into bed with Paloma."
"You're kidding!" Katie said, getting into it. "I think that's where I might 'a drawn the line, like said, 'Hey, there, Paloma. Like, HELLO! Like, EXCUUUUSE ME."
John smiled.
"And the way she paints herself now," Katie went on, "as a model of virtue." She shook her head, marveling. "But three's golden, right?"
"Not that night," John said, smiling fondly, as though the undivulged memories were almost too precious to share.
He finished his second glass of vodka and looked at Katie, who was still waiting for him to continue the story. "You know," he said. "Your nose is exactly like Paloma's. You ever notice that?"
"You're kidding." She ran a finger along the curve of her nose and seemed to ponder it for a moment. "You want me to put on music, or something?"
"Ok," John said. He didn't feel like moving or talking anymore. He just wanted to sit there and let his head spin, and listen to this large, friendly woman with the Philadelphia accent, who now knew more about his junior year in Spain than all of his colleagues at the State Department, combined. He started to regret that he'd lied to her about that night in Segovia. He looked over at her, hunched over the stereo, wiping a CD on her blouse and placing it in the machine. The blue ribbon that held back her hair was falling off. Why did he have to lie to her? John felt his nose running. He sniffed, and wiped an eye with his sleeve.
The music came on, some kind of soft jazz with strings. Katie walked back toward John and saw right away that he was crying.
She rushed toward him, saying, "Aw, what's the matter?" She sat next to him on the couch and grabbed his hand. John looked at her through his tears and saw a pair of brown eyes and knotted brows swimming about six inches from his own.
He said, "I just..." But he couldn't finish the sentence.
"Awww," Katie said. She ran a hand through his hair, trying to comfort him.
They sat there for a minute, listening to the music. Finally, John said, "You know. That scene I told you about in Segovia? It wasn't exactly like that."
"You were the first one, right?" Katie said, sounding like a mother pepping up a six-year-old.
He shook his head, and she pulled her hand from his hair. "That wasn't Paloma in the bed. It was somebody else."
"Tssst. That doesn't matter," she murmured, snuggling closer to him. "But you did know Paloma Pollack, back then, right?"
John nodded. "I just switched her with this woman, because... Oh I don't know why I did it." He was finished crying now and a little angry with himself.
"Kiss me," Katie said. Her voice was about an inch from his ear.
He turned to her, suddenly finding her beautiful and wondering if it was the alcohol.
"Kiss me," she whispered.
John obediently inched toward her and closed his eyes.
"Hold it right there," she said, putting up a hand. "Keep your eyes open."
"Huh?"
"I want you to remember who you're kissing. Understand?"
John smiled and kissed her, first on the tip of the nose, that beautiful nose, and then on the mouth.

By building mathematical models of its own employees, IBM aims to improve productivity and automate management

by Stephen Baker

BusinessWeek's 2006 Cover Story, "Math Will Rock Your World," announced a new age of numbers. With the rise of new networks, the story argued, all of us were channeling the details of our lives into vast databases. Every credit-card purchase, every cell-phone call, every click on the computer mouse fed these digital troves. Those with the tools and skills to make sense of them could begin to decipher our movements, desires, diseases, and shopping habits—and predict our behavior. This promised to transform business and society. In a book expanding upon this Cover Story, The Numerati, Senior Writer Stephen Baker introduces us to the mathematical wizards who are digging through our data to decode us as patients, shoppers, voters, potential terrorists—even lovers.

One of the most promising laboratories for the Numerati is the workplace, where every keystroke, click, and e-mail can be studied. In a chapter called "The Worker," Baker travels to IBM, where mathematicians are building predictive models of their own colleagues. An excerpt:

On a late spring morning I drive up into the forests of Westchester County, N.Y., to the headquarters of IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center. It sits like a fortress atop a hill, a long, curved wall of glass reflecting the cotton-ball clouds floating above. I have a date there with Samer Takriti, a Syrian-born mathematician. He heads up a team that's piecing together mathematical models of 50,000 of IBM's tech consultants. The idea is to pile up inventories of all of their skills and then to calculate, mathematically, how best to deploy them. I'm here to find out how Takriti and his colleagues go about turning IBM's workers into numbers. If this works, his team plans to apply these models to other companies and to automate much of what we now call management.

Takriti, a slim 40-year-old with wide, languid eyes, opens the door of his small office. He wears a rugby shirt tucked tightly into blue jeans. I tell him that being modeled doesn't sound like much fun. I picture an all-knowing boss anticipating my every move, perhaps sending me an e-mail with the simple message, "No!" before I even get up my nerve to ask for a raise. But Takriti focuses on the positive. Imagine that your boss finally recognizes your strengths, he says—maybe ones that are hidden even to you. Then he "puts you into situations where you will thrive."

 Samer Takriti, at the Watson Research Center

COMMODITIZING WORKERS

Still, Takriti confesses that he's nervous. His assignment is to translate the complexity of highly intelligent knowledge workers into the same types of equations and algorithms that are used to fine-tune shipping or predict the life span and production of a mainframe computer. With time, he and his team hope to build detailed models for each worker, each one complete with a person's quirks, daily commute, and allies, perhaps even enemies. These models might one day include whether the workers eat beef or pork, how seriously they take the Sabbath, whether a bee sting or a peanut sauce could lay them low. No doubt, some of them thrive even in the filthy air in Beijing or Mexico City, while others wheeze. If so, the models would eventually include this detail, among countless others. The idea is to build richly textured models that behave in their symbolic realm just like their flesh-and-blood counterparts. Then planners can manipulate them, looking for the most efficient combinations.

Takriti's team is hardly starting from scratch. IBM has long been a leader in converting all kinds of complex systems into numbers. Right after World War II, Big Blue used a new science called Operations Research to construct a mathematical model of the company's industrial supply chain. It included its costs and capabilities, as well as limitations, or constraints. Once the supply chain existed as numbers, engineers could experiment with it—optimizing it—and later incorporate the improvements in the real-life version. This drove efficiency and lowered costs. It was wonderful for manufacturing. But now, as IBM has shifted its focus to services, the corporate supply chain is made up less of machine parts than of people—Takriti and some 300,000 of his colleagues. His job, quite simply, is to start optimizing his co-workers.

To put together these profiles, Takriti requires mountains of facts about each employee. He has unleashed some 40 PhDs, from data miners and statisticians to anthropologists, to comb through workers' data. Personnel files, which include annual evaluations, are off-limits at IBM. But practically every other bit of data is fair game. Sifting through résumés and project records, the team can assemble a profile of each worker's skills and experience. Online calendars show how employees use their time and who they meet with. By tracking the use of cell phones and handheld computers, Takriti's researchers may be able to map the workers' movements. Call records and e-mails define the social networks of each consultant. Whom do they copy on their e-mails? Do they send blind copies to certain people?

These hidden messages could point to the growth of informal networks within the company. They may show that a midlevel manager is quietly leading an important group of colleagues—and that his boss is out of the loop. Eventually, say experts, e-mail analysis may single out workers whose behavior places them outside the known networks. Are these outliers depressed, about to jump ship, consorting with the competition? In companies around the world, the Numerati will be hunting for statistical clues.

Even without reading all the e-mails, managers can automatically spot the most common words that circulate within each group of workers. This permits them to establish the nature of each relationship. They can also see how communications shift with time. Two workers may discuss software programming Tuesday through Friday but spend much of their time on Monday sending e-mails about the past weekend's football games. "The next big step," says Kathleen M. Carley, a lead researcher in social networks at Carnegie Mellon University, "is to take tools like this and tie them to scheduling and productivity programs."

Takriti's scheme is even more ambitious. He is not given to bold forecasts. But if his system is successful, here's how it will work: Picture an IBM manager who gets an assignment to send a team of five to set up a call center in Manila. She sits down at the computer and fills out a form. It's almost like booking a vacation online. She puts in the dates and clicks on menus to describe the job and the skills needed. Perhaps she stipulates the ideal budget range. The results come back, recommending a particular team. All the skills are represented. Maybe three of the five people have a history of working together smoothly. They all have passports and live near airports with direct flights to Manila. One of them even speaks Tagalog.

Everything looks fine, except for one line that's highlighted in red. The budget. It's $40,000 over! The manager sees that the computer architect on the team is a veritable luminary, a guy who gets written up in the trade press. Sure, he's a 98.7% fit for the job, but he costs $1,000 an hour. It's as if she shopped for a weekend getaway in Paris and wound up with a penthouse suite at the Ritz.

DO THE MATH

Hmmm. The manager asks the system for a cheaper architect. New options come back. One is a new 29-year-old consultant based in India who costs only $85 per hour. That would certainly patch the hole in the budget. Unfortunately, he's only a 69% fit for the job. Still, he can handle it, according to the computer, if he gets two weeks of training. Can the job be delayed?

This is management in a world run by Numerati. As IBM sees it, the company has little choice. The workforce is too big, the world too vast and complicated for managers to get a grip on their workers the old-fashioned way—by talking to people who know people who know people. Word of mouth is too foggy and slow for the global economy. Personal connections are too constricted. Managers need the zip of automation to unearth a consultant in New Delhi, just the way a generation ago they located a shipment of condensers in Chicago. For this to work, the consultant—just like the condensers—must be represented as a series of numbers.

Eventually, companies could take this knowledge much further, using the numbers, in a sense, to clone us. Imagine, says Aleksandra Mojsilovic, one of Takriti's close colleagues, that the company has a superior worker named Joe Smith. Management could really benefit from two or three others just like him, or even a dozen. Once the company has built rich mathematical profiles of Smith and his fellow workers, it might be possible to identify at least a few of the experiences or routines that make Joe Smith so good. "If you had the full employment history, you could even compute the steps to become a Joe Smith," she says. "I'm not saying you can recreate a scientist, or a painter, or a musician," Mojsilovic adds. "But there are a lot of job roles that are really commodities." And if people turn out to be poorly designed for these jobs, they'll be reconfigured, first mathematically and then in life.

DIFFERENT STROKES

Sound scary? It may depend on where you're perched on the food chain. Remember the $1,000-per-hour consultant who almost got dispatched to the Philippines? He didn't end up going, and instead, in IBM's scheme, he remained "on the bench." Takriti smiles. "That's what we call it," he says. "I think the term comes from sports." The question, of course, is how long IBM wants to have that high-priced talent gathering splinters. If there isn't any work to justify his immense talents, shouldn't they put him on something else, just to keep him busy?

Not necessarily, says Takriti. Job satisfaction is one of the automatic system's constraints. If workers get angry or bored to tears, their productivity is bound to plummet. The computer keeps this in mind (in a manner of speaking). As you might expect, it deals very gently with superstars. Since they make lots of money for the company during short bursts of activity, they get plenty of time on the bench. But grunt workers in this hierarchy get far less consideration. They're calculated as commodities. Their skills are "fungible." This means these workers are virtually indistinguishable from others, whether they're in India or Uruguay. They contribute little to profits. It pains Takriti to say this, because humans are not machines. They have varying skills and potential to grow. He appreciates this. But looking at it mathematically, he says, the company should keep its commodity workers laboring as close as possible to 100% of the time. Not much kickback time on the bench for them.

Where is this all leading? I pose the question one afternoon to Pierre Haren. A PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a prominent member of the Numerati, he's the founder and chief executive of ILOG. It's a French company that uses operations research to fine-tune industrial systems, charting, for example, the most efficient delivery routes for Coors beer. ILOG makes allowances for all kinds of constraints. For example, a few years ago, the Singapore government wanted to avoid diplomatic spats at its new airport. So officials asked ILOG to synchronize the flow of passengers, making sure that those from mainland China wouldn't cross paths with travelers from Taiwan. Haren speaks in a strong French accent. We're talking in the lobby of a Midtown hotel in New York, and he has to yell to make himself heard over a particularly loud fountain.

DATA SERFDOM?

Haren says the efforts under way at places like IBM will not only break down each worker into sets of skills and knowledge. The same systems will also divide their days and weeks into small periods of time—hours, half-hours, eventually even minutes. At the same time, the jobs that have to be done, whether it's building a software program or designing an airliner, are also broken down into tiny steps. In this sense, Haren might as well be describing the industrial engineering that led to assembly lines a century ago. Big jobs are parsed into thousands of tasks and divided among many workers. But the work Haren is discussing is not done by hand, hydraulic presses, or even robots. It flows from the brain. The labor is defined by knowledge and ideas. As he sees it, that expertise will be tapped minute by minute across the world. This job sharing is already starting to happen, as companies break up projects and move big pieces of them offshore. But once the workers are represented as mathematical models, it will be far easier to break down their days into billable minutes and send their smarts to fulfill jobs all over the world.

Consider IBM's superstar consultant. He's roused off the bench, whether he's on a ski lift at St. Moritz or leading a seminar at Armonk, N.Y. He reaches into his pocket and sees a message asking for 10 minutes of his precious time. He might know just the right algorithm, or perhaps a contact or a customer. Maybe he sends back word that he's busy. (He's a star, after all.) But if he takes part, he assumes his place in what Haren calls a virtual assembly line. "This is the equivalent of the industrial revolution for white-collar workers," Haren says.

It's getting late in Takriti's office. I can see that he's concerned about my line of questioning. This virtual assembly line sounds menacing. The surveillance has more than a whiff of Big Brother. For those of us who aren't $1,000-per-hour consultants, life bound to a mathematical model is sounding like abject data serfdom.

Here's Takriti's counterargument. As the tools he's building make workers more productive, the market will reward them. We already use math programs to plot our trips and look for dates. Why not use them to map our careers—and negotiate for better pay? (Takriti, it turns out months later, masters these market dynamics: He was able to shop his gilded Numerati credentials to several Web companies and banks, and finally leaves IBM in late 2007 for a post as a top mathematician at Goldman Sachs. Work on the modeling project continues apace, says IBM.) All sorts of workers will be able to calculate their own worth with more precision. Let's say analytical tools show that a consultant's value to the company topped $2 million one year. Shouldn't she have access to that number and be free to use it as a negotiating tool? In a workplace defined by metrics, even those of us who like to think that we're beyond measurement will face growing pressure to build our case with numbers of our own.

Adapted from The Numerati by Stephen Baker, copyright © 2008. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing. All rights reserved.