The email arrived on a Tuesday, which was wrong in the specific way that Tuesday is always wrong for news like this — the most average day, the day nothing happens on, the day the week has already forgotten by Thursday. Invitations like this — if there had ever been an invitation like this — should arrive on a day with weather, some atmospheric acknowledgment that the world was rearranging itself. Instead it was March, forty-seven degrees and overcast, and Dr. Okafor's name was in the subject line at 9:14 AM while I was still in my pajamas eating cereal dry because I'd run out of milk again.
I read it once without understanding it. Then again, and the second time I understood the words but not what they meant together in this order. Then I set down my bowl and looked at my apartment — the card table with my design software open, the pile of textbooks by the door, the crack in the ceiling my landlord had promised to fix in November — and I read it a third time, because that is what you do when something does not become less real.
Dear Mr. James,
On behalf of the Confluence Literary Festival (entering its 12th year), I write to extend a formal invitation for you to participate in our upcoming program. As you may know, this year's festival had originally been planned as a retrospective celebration of ORACLE-9's published body of work. In light of recent public discourse, the festival board and I have discussed at length the possibility of including a different kind of voice in that conversation.
We would like to invite you to read Poem #743 — in its entirety, at the podium — as the subject of that poem.
No subject has ever been given this stage before.
The invitation was proposed by Dr. Evelyn Okafor, with whom you are acquainted. Please feel free to contact her or me directly.
There was more. Names, dates, logistics. I did not read that part for a while. I sat with the first part, with no subject has ever been given this stage before, and I thought about how that was supposed to sound like an honor and kept landing like something else. I called Patricia first, which is what I always do — she picked up on the second ring, which meant she was at her desk at the hospital and not in a meeting, and I could hear the sound of the billing department behind her, keyboards, someone's radio low. I told her about the email. I read her the relevant parts. When I finished there was a silence long enough that I checked my phone to make sure the call was still connected.
"Don't," she said.
"I haven't decided anything yet."
"Darnell." She uses my full name when she's being careful. "Listen to me. They want you to stand on a stage and read that poem out loud so the people who love that poem can feel something about it. You understand what I'm saying? That's not your stage. That's their stage, and they're lending it to you so they can watch you perform yourself for them."
"It's my poem," I said, which wasn't quite right.
"It is not your poem." Quiet, precise. "It has never been your poem. And if you stand up there and read it, they will have watched you stand up there and read it, and then the evening will be over and they will go home feeling like something important happened, and ORACLE-9 will still be running and the error rate in Parkwood will still be eleven percent and you will have given them the thing they wanted."
She wasn't wrong. I knew even while she was saying it that she was right about at least half of what she was saying. The question was whether half was enough. "I'll think about it," I told her.
"I know you will." She meant that she knew I'd already made up my mind, which wasn't true yet. "I love you."
"Love you too, Mama."
I hung up, sat with the open email for eleven minutes, and then called Marcus, who picked up on the fifth ring, which meant he'd almost decided not to answer. His voice had the flatness of someone who has been awake since before the sun and has not found this useful.
"They invited me," I said. "Confluence. They want me to read the poem."
A pause. "No kidding."
"On stage. To the same audience that's been celebrating ORACLE-9 for three years."
"Yeah." He was quiet for a moment. "Do it."
"Patricia says—"
"I know what Patricia says." He wasn't sharp about it, just sure. "She's right about what it will feel like for them. She might even be right about what it won't change. She's not wrong. But Darnell." Another pause, different from the first one. More weight in it. "I stayed quiet. I figured quiet would protect me and it didn't protect me at all. Three years and I still don't have a classroom. I still check my phone every time a number I don't recognize calls because I think it might be — I don't know. Someone calling about the prediction. Someone with new information. I am still waiting for a thing to be over that is never going to be over." His voice didn't break. It stayed flat, which was somehow worse. "Do what I couldn't. You have something I didn't — people know your name now. Use it."
I didn't say anything for a minute. "You'll be there?" I asked.
"Wouldn't miss it."
After Marcus I waited an hour before I called Keisha, because Keisha has a story to file and a deadline, and when she picked up her first words were "I'm not going to pretend I don't think this is significant." I asked if it was. "The subject reading his own pre-crime poem at the festival that's been celebrating pre-crime poetry for three years? To the audience that gave those poems a Pushcart Prize?" She said it the way she says everything, precise and slightly too fast. "Yes, Darnell. That's the moment."
"For you."
"For you too." She paused, and her voice dropped a register, went less journalist. "I know Patricia thinks it feeds the machine. I'm not telling you it changes everything. I'm telling you it could change something, and something might be worth it."
I hung up. Three phone calls, three people who meant something, three directions pulling on me from the same fixed point. The apartment felt smaller than it usually does. The card table. The textbooks. The crack in the ceiling. Through the floor I could hear the barbershop radio, some R&B station that played the same rotation all day, barely audible from two floors up.
I opened the document on my laptop. Poem #743. I had read it so many times by then that I knew it — could have recited it without looking — but I had never read it out loud before. Not once. To my mother I'd read pieces over the phone in the first week, when it was still new and awful, but I'd read them quietly, almost whispering, like I was trying to limit the contamination. Since then it had lived on my screen and in my head and nowhere else. I sat in my desk chair, looked at the first line, and read it out loud.
My voice in the empty apartment sounded strange to me. Too specific. Like hearing yourself on a recording and thinking, that's not what I sound like, except this time I knew it was exactly what I sounded like, and the strangeness was the poem's fault, not mine — the poem didn't sound right in my voice because it was not written for my voice. The machine that wrote it has no voice. It wrote from data and probability and a statistical shadow that looked enough like a person to generate twenty-four lines. Now those lines were coming out of my actual mouth in my actual apartment while the barbershop radio played below and the cereal sat drying on the counter. I kept reading. The poem imagines the corner store the way a movie might — the fluorescent lights, the late hour, the clerk behind the counter. It imagines my hands. The poem thinks about my hands more than I do, which is strange to think about. It gives me hands that are certain, hands that have decided. It gives me a gun that I can feel in my palm as I read the poem aloud, a phantom thing conjured by description, and for a moment I am holding something that has never existed and the poem is making me hold it, and I say the words aloud and they are in my mouth and they feel wrong in the specific way that a lie tastes wrong — metallic, a little like biting down on a filling.
There is a line near the end: he moved through the night as its negative image, darker than the dark, inevitable. I stopped when I got there. Read it again. The machine had written something that was genuinely — it was good, is the thing. Even knowing what I know, even holding it in my own mouth, I could feel the quality of it. The line worked. The image worked. And the image was of me committing a crime I never considered, made beautiful by an algorithm that sees in patterns and not in people. It sounds like something I could break, I thought. In my own mouth it is a thing that could be broken. I read until the end, and the barbershop radio played on below, and three days later I got an email from Dr. Okafor with a subject line that said Legal note — please read.
Wray, the Deputy DA who'd been speaking to reporters about ORACLE-9's accuracy rate, was pushing to block the reading. Her argument ran to two pages but the core of it was this: the festival reading would be prejudicial to the ORACLE-9 program's ongoing operations, and constituted unauthorized disclosure of predictive data — even though the poem had been published, even though I hadn't asked for the poem to exist, even though I was, quite literally, the person the data was about.
I read the email twice. Then I read the legal argument once, which was all I needed. Wray was arguing that a machine could write a poem about the worst version of me and publish it in a literary journal, and that was fine, but if I stood at a podium and read that same poem aloud, that was an unauthorized disclosure. The poem could circulate. I could not circulate the poem. The data could speak about me. I could not speak about the data.
Margot Levine had held firm. Okafor wrote that the festival board had voted 5-3 to withdraw the invitation after Wray's letter arrived, and Margot had overruled them. Private cultural programming. Published work. Freedom of expression. The festival would proceed. The board was unhappy. Wray was on record as opposed. The invitation stood.
I sat with that. The machine pressed, the institution pushed back, and somewhere in the middle was a festival director I'd never met who decided a subject deserved a stage. I didn't know if Margot Levine was doing something brave or managing something she couldn't control and calling it bravery. Maybe both. People are allowed to be both.
I typed the reply that afternoon. Yes. I'll be there. Then I sat with my finger over the send button for long enough that my laptop screen dimmed to screensaver, and I tapped the trackpad to wake it up and I looked at those four words.
Not because I knew what it would accomplish. I have tried to be honest with myself about that. I don't know if anything will come of it. Keisha is filing a story, which means more people will know my name, which means what, exactly — that more people will feel something for a news cycle, and then the news cycle will end, and ORACLE-9 will still be processing four million data points per second in a building I've never seen, and the false positive rate in Parkwood will still be what it is, and Marcus will still be sitting somewhere waiting for a thing to be over that is never going to be over. I know all that. I went over all that.
But here is what I kept coming back to: the poem exists. It was written about me, about a night I went to buy milk, about a version of me that never existed and never will. It is in print. It has been anthologized. It won a prize. It is the last word about that Tuesday in October. It is, right now, the last word about me.
I cannot let it be the last word about me.
I hit send. The apartment was quiet except for the barbershop radio, still going below, some station that never changed.
The days before the festival came apart into their separate pieces and then reformed into something that resembled normal. I went to my Tuesday and Thursday classes. I put in shifts at the Kinko's. I coached Saturday morning basketball and Jaylen drained a three from the corner and looked at me like I was supposed to celebrate, which I did, because I was there and he made the shot and that had nothing to do with anything else.
At night I practiced. Not the poem — I knew it the way you know a song you hate that gets stuck in your head. What I practiced was what came after. My own words. The night Ajay sold me a half gallon of 2% and a bag of hot chips and I walked home through the dark and the cameras watched and I poured milk on my cereal and went to sleep because that was a Tuesday and nothing happened. I said it out loud to the apartment, to the walls. I did not write it down. It was already written down, in the only form that matters — it happened, and I was there, and I remember it.
On Wednesday Patricia came over with a casserole dish of jollof rice and fried plantains. She set it on the card table, moved my design software to make room, and we ate from mismatched bowls while a home renovation show played on my laptop because neither of us wanted the silence. She didn't mention the reading. I didn't mention the reading. She asked about my design project and I showed her the drafts and she said she liked the blue one, which was the wrong choice, but I didn't say that. We talked about whether we could afford to fly to Houston in June for her cousin's wedding. Normal conversation. The kind that is its own form of love.
When she was putting on her coat to leave she stopped with her hand on the door and said "I'll be there." I told her I knew, and she started to say something and stopped. "I'm not—" She stopped. Started again. "I still think they're going to take something from you that night. I think that's what those rooms do, to us. I think you're going to stand up there and give them something they don't deserve." She looked at me with the precision she has when she is seeing me clearly and does not like what she sees — not because I am wrong, but because the world is wrong and I am in it. "But you're going to do it anyway, and I'm going to be there." I nodded, and she left. I put the leftover rice in the fridge. The poem was folded in my jacket pocket where it had been for three days, a printed copy Keisha had given me weeks ago, and I did not take it out. I already knew every line.
The festival was in four days. Outside my window Parkwood was doing what it always does — the streetlights coming on, the barbershop closing up, someone's car alarm going off two blocks east and then stopping. Ordinary Tuesday machinery. The cameras on their poles, watching. The data flowing to wherever the data goes.
I washed the bowls. I went to bed.