SAM ALTMAN AND THE HOT ICE BATH

Here’s the third instalment from a biography of Sam Altman, the Chief Executive Officer of OpenAI, which created ChatGPT, the first publicly available instance of generative AI. The details of Sam’s life are based on interviews conducted by the author with his friends and family members, as well as many hours of interview time with Sam himself.

The year is 2021 and the British Twitch-caster, Eliza Beckerstaff, the one with the Yorkshire accent, coral-pink bangs and adorable wink, is listening to Sam Altman tell a story.

It’s a good day for her. There are pink chrysanthemums on her table, visible for her viewers. She admitted to their provenance —of the flowers, that is — before the interview with Sam Altman began.

“Look at me. Fair going red, I am,” she said, coyly dipping her face behind a hand. “You all know who. Aye, you all know right well who.”

It was true. They definitely knew who the flowers came from.

The rumours started circulating after a slip-up in a League of Legends chat room. Eliza, or SparkleStaff as she’s known in Legends circles, was playing her favourite champion, the half-dragon fighter, Shyvana, when she referred to a pair of mixed-race champions engaged in battle as “some black milk action.”

“Defs fancy me some of that,” replied someone known as Ripper, or RipTrip7, playing as the dashing Wuju Bladesman, Master Yi. “Could murder one of them pistachio pancakes right about now.”

This would have been fine. Everyone knew of Black Milk, a popular cafe at the Afflecks Pavilion in Manchester’s trendy Northern Quarter. The pancakes, the gelato, the indulgent Bailey’s affogatos. Ripper’s association of “black milk action” with the Black Milk cafe could hardly disrupt the easy, playful banter that always provided such a melodic soundtrack to their weekly gameplay.

But then Eliza chimed in with, “I thought you only ordered the blueberry though, nah, Minh?”

Which silenced the group. Some grunts, muffled voices, soft keyboard clatter. What’d she say? Blueberry what? And she’s actually calling him Minh now?

“That’s what your mum told me,” Eliza attempted, not very convincingly, to cover for herself. His mum? She’s talking to his mum? When was this? “That time I saw you and your mum at Afflecks.”

But a player named Tracer, or Luv2TraceX, who was embodying the frog-like river king, Tahm Kench, was quick to call out her obvious dissembling.

“You working at Black Milk now? Thought you were doing nights at the Amsterdam?”

To which someone named Cling (ClingtheGreat) added, “Being a bad bitch Beckerspy now, are we? Watching people from the shadows, I reckon?”

Was it intentional, she wondered later? Had she meant to open the floodgates of speculation and rumour? Probably. Why not? The impulse was innocent, she reasoned. More feeling than calculation. How else should you behave when your soulmate and future husband expresses a desire like that? Wasn’t it only natural to let him know you cared?

Besides, wasn’t it Minh, after all — for that was Ripper’s real name, Minh-Bảo — who had surreptitiously signalled his affection by mentioning Black Milk in the first place? It was easy to convince herself that Minh’s comment was a secret message meant for her alone. To let her know the words “black milk” would conjure in his mind, for the rest of his life, nothing other than the cafe at Afflecks where the two of them first hooked up last week?

“I’m gonna marry you,” she had said to him. “I know,” he replied. “Feels like you already have. Like we’ve been married a long time.” “Innit true?” she said. “What you think about it? You like it?” “It’s good,” he said smiling. “Damn good.”

So it’s decided then?

It is.

With such a promise, staying silent in that group, not letting Minh know you were thinking of him, wouldn’t that have indicated a kind of betrayal?

Then again, she suspected, even at her ripe age of 22, with all her years making fun of — or “Beckerspying” on — the romantic failures of her friends, maybe she was acting just like every schoolgirl with a crush. Being possessive. Ensuring none of the other Minh-lovers (for who could resist that gorgeous soul?) would out-compete her in their intimacy. Maybe that’s all it was.

Or maybe it was just an inability to contain the dam-burst of her joy.

She touched the pink flowers. Damn good.

“Isn’t your brother named Jack?” she asks her guest, Sam Altman, whom her older sister and volunteer publicist, Marcy, described as a rich tech-bro from California working in artificial intelligence. Sex bots, Silicon Valley pretentiousness, end-of-the-world stuff, plenty of piss to take, Becks, her sister had said. “Take you time popping the bubble-wrap. You know, like it’s an unboxing. Before the big reveal.”

“Different Jack. Jack Kornfield. The Buddhist monk.”

“A monk? As in monk monk?”

The story Sam is recounting happened two years earlier, in the Fall of 2019, just a few months before the Covid pandemic swept across the planet. Sam had known Jack Kornfield a long time. They had meditated together, sat on panels together, discussed how something like compassion might be programmed into AI.

When he was raising his first billion dollars as CEO of the artificial intelligence company, OpenAI, Sam once called Jack for advice.

“I wanted to know about a person’s responsibility toward other people. I mean, if I make a promise to someone, okay, I’m bound to it. But if people derive their own expectations of me, that’s not my problem, right?”

“And this monk friend of yours replies how?”

“He says, ‘Listen to me, Sam,’ and then continues to breathe loudly into the phone for several minutes. Each breath extending longer and longer. Then he hangs up.”

“You’re still friends with this guy?”

“The answers are always there. That’s what he was telling me. You just need take the time to clear your mind and let them speak to you.”

“Either that or he was, you know,” says Eliza. “Heavy breathing has a different meaning to most people.”

After an obligatory smile and half-laugh from Sam (to confirm he understands the reference), he continues with his story. He describes how he was giving Jack a tour of his new home in Big Sur, California. How he thought Jack would love the Japanese garden with its little red-painted bridges, miniature stone-carved pagodas, raked gravel. Or the way the high-ceilinged atrium, with its hanging lamps and gentle amber hues, would evoke a tranquility his Buddhist pal would appreciate.

“Jack once told me he adores clean, decisive architecture with open spaces and — I’ll never forget his words — ‘sharp, wakeful shadows.’ But all he seemed interested in,” says Sam, “was the ice-bath.”

Sam has intentionally omitted details about his house, a formidable cement and reinforced glass structure that crouches coldly in a redwood grove. He doesn’t mention that the house is built to withstand the outer shockwaves of a nuclear blast or a magnitude 9.8 earthquake. Or how, once they had passed through the Japanese garden, down the mossy wooden pathway that leads to the atrium — all splintered sun and restless robins — the first thing Sam showed him was the guns closet, with its shotguns, assault rifles, specialty firearms.

“These gas masks,” Sam had informed the monk, incorrectly, “are the same ones used by the Israeli Defence Force.”

Nor does Sam describe for Eliza his library, with its view of the helicopter landing pad out back. Or the games room (billiards, foosball, ping-pong), the thirty-seat theatre, the kitchen — one of three — where a pair of young Cuban chefs prepare the day’s sushi.

But most importantly, he leaves out the fact that the ice-bath in question is actually located in an underground bunker, with a pinewood sauna, a 25 meter pool, another games room (shuffleboard, pickleball, air-hockey), back-up batteries, a water filtering system, an indoor well and a padlocked dispensary for antibiotics, cannabis, and potassium iodide to help protect the thyroid against radioactive clouds.

“So the two of us climb into the bath,” Altman tells Eliza.

“You mean a tub with water, right?”

“Right. Think of a hot tub, but smaller. A large metal barrel. With freezing cold water.”

“Ice cubes?”

“Sometimes.”

Eliza leans forward in her seat, smiles archly at the camera, fires a wink, which copies, divides, subdivides, multiplies, ricochets around the world at unfathomable speeds. “I’m counting on your eyes,” Marcy once told her, “to make us very rich.”

In the beginning, that particular wink was like a leaky squirt gun. No force behind it, no kickback. But over time, with repeated practice, it began gathering ballistic energy. She could feel it, however faintly. The rebounding vibrations. A spike in subscribers. An increase in positive feedback from her followers. Her “Beckerstaffers” as she calls them.

Got no aim yet, she realises. It still sprays, like grapeshot, indiscriminately in all directions. Tons of collateral damage. But she’ll get there, she knows. Better timing, precision, variety. Each unique combination of squints, winks, eye-rolls, deep gazes at the camera would be its own weapon, with its own impact.

She spent a lot of time in front of the mirror, refining this facial arsenal of hers. She wondered what Minh would think of this. Would he approve? Of course, she thinks. After that evening at the Black Milk, after their promise, he will become her accomplice.

“Right, so I’m just trying to visualise this, aye? Two grown men sitting starkers in a barrel filled with freezing water, that right?”

“Well, if Jack says he wants to show you something, you don’t say no.”

“Sounds erotic, Sam. You’re married, no?”

“I am.”

“Were you touching? We all want to know, Sam. Your nether-bits. Were they close enough to actually touch?”

“I’m a small man, Liza. Five-six. One hundred and fifty-two pounds. Plenty of room.”

“But were you touching?”

“I honestly didn’t think about that. I wasn’t thinking at all, really. Other than how freaking cold I was.”

“Well, I’m pondering that, Sam. In fact, I’m pretty sure we’re all pondering that.”

“So here’s the thing, Liza. I usually get in the ice bath after a hot sauna, so I’m usually warmed up inside. But this was different. This was super cold. We’re both in the tub, and Jack says to me, ‘Look at me, Sam. Look into my eyes.’ So I’m looking into his eyes, and I’m not kidding you, after a few minutes, I start feeling this warm energy emanating from his eyes into mine. I suddenly realise I’m no longer shivering. Then I notice these wisps of vapour rising up from the water, right? I see drops of condensation falling from his moustache. Beads of sweat on his head. I’m not kidding you. The water had gotten warmer. Not just warmer. It was actually hot.”

“And?”

“Nothing, just shows the power of the mind. A phenomenon I’ll never forget.”

“That’s it? That‘s the whole story? No naughty stuff?”

“Sorry to disappoint you.”

“It was just getting steamy there, Sam. Whatever. You need to tell better stories. Wolves, earthquakes. Hot water to cold. None of this woo-woo wankering stuff, you know? No one cares about that. You wanna know my favourite sculpture? It’s called No Time to Think. As in, let’s keep things moving, dull to interesting, start to finish, aye?”

She scrutinises Sam’s image on the screen.

Time for the unboxing. The big reveal, as Marcy had said.

“So there’s something I want to know, Sam. Can you tell us about your sister, Annie?”

As anticipated, she can see Sam’s expression shift. Confusion, discomfort, was the tightening of his jaw really that thing they call — ire? Well done, Marcy, she thinks. Such an adept publicist, her big sister.

“You said earlier you like working with your brothers,” Eliza explains. “You talk about how they’ve helped you with your start-ups. But we never hear about your sister. Your sister, Annie. Why is that?” She leans back, crosses her arms, the way you do after killing an opponent in League.

The fact is, Sam can’t talk about his sister. Never could, never will. Physically, neurologically, his thoughts about Annie don’t coalesce in any meaningful way. Not that he doesn’t ever think of her. He thinks of Annie in the way most people think of the cosmos. A known and ever-present entity you rarely pay attention to, because you know its beyond the reach of your understanding. Annie, Sam knows, is a black hole of a human being, an incomprehensible void from which the truth can never escape.

She was born on January 13, 1994, at St Louis’s Mercy Hospital. Not the same hospital where Sam entered the world, Chicago’s Northwestern, but the same hospital where Sam was treated for a broken leg nine months and three days earlier.

Whereas Sam had arrived into his mother arms tightly swaddled in a blue fleece blanket, Annie’s arrival was very different. For one thing, their father, Jerry Altman, was present for this birth, dressed in his dark realtor’s suit with a loose yellow tie. He held his wife Connie’s hand while watching a pair of mourning doves out the window.

For another thing, unlike with Sam’s birth, the infant that Connie received that day was naked, doughy, misshapen, with strange red lines lashed across her loose skin. Congenital marks, creases from ill-folded limbs.

“Such gorgeous eyes,” said the nurse, but Connie was exploring the malformed foot, rotating it in her hand, trying to solve its riddle. Another mangled foot. Same hospital. How would she fix this one? It wasn’t just scar and skin tissue like the last one. Vitamin E oil wouldn’t help. Couldn’t the nurses have covered the poor girl, thought Connie? Or did they fear that, by hiding the deformities, Connie’s imagination might conjure up worse defects, an even deeper revulsion? Like an unseen wound beneath a clean bandage.

Probing, beautiful eyes.

She handed the baby to its father. Maybe he could solve it.

Before Sam’s accident, she and Jerry hadn’t touched each other for years. They had been far too content with their lives to make love. Jerry was having torrid affairs with women who wanted more out of him — or seemed to. Deeper meanings, higher callings, new experiences to learn from.

His photogenic wife was evidence of his desirability. His trio of sons were proof of his fatherly affection. His large colonial home hinted at a wealth he believed (mistakenly) could last at least a decade. All very attractive, reassuring, but never enough to keep his lovers interested. Where was his social conscience? His appreciation of art? Dance with me, Jerry. Have you never heard the Grateful Dead or seen the movie Harold and Maude? Can you not recognise, Jerry, the fragrance of pink angel’s trumpets on hot afternoons? The song of a cardinal?

Maybe Connie knew about the affairs. Maybe not. The adoration she felt for her sons, especially for Sam, was its own infidelity, a happy secret life her inattentive husband could only disrupt. She, too, was learning, seeking more from life as she immersed herself in the strange, exhilarating ardors that occupy the minds of three young boys.

Did she have lovers? Secure, attractive men, her uptight colleagues at her clinic, were quick to grow smitten with the pretty blonde dermatologist. They would invite Connie to leisurely lunches where they would drink mai-tais and lemon drop martinis. Get her drunk enough to maybe hold her hand, maybe touch a knee. But her carnal pleasures took place alone in bathrooms, or in her car as she waited for swimming lessons to end, because none of these men, she knew, could match the exceptional men her sons would become. The men she had committed herself to raising.

Then, surprisingly, after Sam was found in the street with his broken leg and over half a litre less of blood, she and Jerry had resumed their lovemaking. She caressed her husband with an impulsive vigour, as if to reassure herself of a body’s resilience. The substantial mass of her husband — the soft belly, fleshy bottom, strong hairy legs. All of it intact, lasting, impenetrable.

Connie’s body too, Jerry sensed, was yearning for a similar affirmation of its durability, which, eager to prove his marital prowess, he offered with a matching intensity. The wildest, most strenuous wrenching of limbs. The deepest possible intimacy. Indestructible, invincible bodies.

It seemed to work, fleetingly, unconsciously, to alleviate the anguish over their son’s ordeal. All that physical abuse and yet no damage. Indeed, the opposite of damage. Their bodies coming alive.

But here now, nine months later, was what seemed the inevitable consequence of that furious passion:

A twisted child.

To make matters worse, unlike her three older brothers, the baby wouldn’t latch and nurse. It had always been a source of pride for Connie, telling her friends how she had never purchased formula for her boys, not once. But with Annie’s arrival, that changed; and with it the notion that Connie alone could nourish her newborn. Connie would depend not just on her husband — “maybe you can solve this” — but on the entire commercial apparatus, on the sum total of products that people invented, marketed and sold.

She became less imaginative, more mechanical, reactive. Just as, for most of her life, even after Annie began swallowing the Gerber’s puree, Connie could never again enter a Dierbergs, or a Shop n’ Save, without involuntarily angling down the baby-care aisle to check the prices of Enfamil.

The baby transformed Jerry even more profoundly. To Jerry, Annie’s misshapen limbs had the effect of amplifying her beauty. Not just a girl, at last, but a girl of uniqueness, a girl requiring an extraordinary kind of love.

It was an opportunity, Jerry knew, to prove himself capable of unconditional love, just as he had once conjured affection for all the distorted emotions he encountered in his new wife. Her hidden phobias and insecurities. Her fears of flying, of insects, of wrinkles, the dread of being invisible to any woman who appeared younger than herself. Few had witnessed that tenderness, his genuine concern for her wellbeing.

Least of all, Connie.

Sam and his brothers, Jack and Max — but especially Sam — marvelled at their father’s delusion. Did he not notice Annie’s inability to walk by herself? To wear matching shoes? To hold a spoon? How many bowls of porridge would he clean up after her spills?

Moreover, did he not appreciate the more classical ideal of his taut young boys? Their sinewy, Aryan physiques? The way, like good little Hitlerjugend, they excelled in sports — ping pong in the playroom, water-polo in the backyard pool (with Sam always winning)? Or how their dexterous fingers danced over the Playstation controllers, or how they could vault themselves from a 50-foot cliff into searing hot-springs?

But Jerry persisted in lavishing affection on his baby girl, despite her constant fussiness, the colic, her crying at the merest provocation. A bad habit, thought Sam, this coddling. Akin to how his mother had once described her drinking problem, which she credited Sam for helping her overcome. “You wrestled that demon from the controls,” she told him. “Took over the captain’s seat the moment you were born. I’d be nothing but a sorry alcoholic if it wasn’t for you.”

Even the barely 10-years-old Sam could discern his father’s peculiar dependency on Annie’s helplessness, and the torment it was sure to inflict upon them both. When the boys could no longer tolerate their sister’s disturbances — upended chess pieces, torn UNO cards, a slobbery head drum from the VCR Sam was operating on — and would retreat to another room, Annie would shriek uncontrollably.

Let her cry, Sam would think. She needs to learn. Needs to understand the consequences of her behaviour. But their father would pacify her with ice cream and tender words; and inevitably cart her into whichever room the three boys occupied.

“She craves your company,” he would say. “She wants to play your games.”

Wants, wants, wants. Sam’s annoyance was especially acute when it came to Annie’s phobia of water. Every evening at bath time, Annie’s screams would pierce the Altman home, lasting until long after she was dried and tucked into bed. It grated on Sam, the screaming. He himself loved the water, revelled in its soothing embrace. He believed Annie’s fear could be easily conquered if only his parents were willing to push her beyond her fear. Propel her past the threshold where terra firma and gravity fade. Where water becomes one’s domain — a different world, different physics, different opportunities.

In fact, Sam mused, maybe the water could offer his sister a kind of rebirth. An emancipation for someone so clearly ill-equipped to thrive on land. He imagined his family thanking him someday; and he imagined Annie, in her frilly swimsuit celebrating victory at the Special Olympics, being most thankful of all.

This idea lodged itself firmly in Sam’s mind, and when Annie was five years old, he found himself sitting on the end of the fishing pier at Jefferson Lake with Annie on his lap. She was wearing her ruffled white summer dress, and Sam was holding her feet, his own feet dangling over the flat reflected clouds teeming with damsel flies and water striders.

Max, Jack and their father were loading up the car after a day of frisbee, frozen custard, and the difficult assembly of a kite that never got airborne. The air had been dead-still all day.

It was when he heard his mother calling out — “C’mon, Sam, we’re going to leave without you” — that he made his move. As he explained it later, he was standing up, responding to his mother’s summons, when Annie, yes it was Annie he claimed, suddenly, for no reason at all, kicked herself free of his grip. It all happened so fast. Maybe she didn’t want to go home, he suggested. Maybe something in the lake caught her attention. Or maybe she just wanted to swim the way she saw her brothers swimming.

The water had cleaved and then resealed. Shivered then stretched flat again. Below the surface, who knew? But above, the world returned to stillness. Same long shadows across the water, clouds like tattoos, and only the insects providing evidence of a living world.

“You could have jumped in after her, Sam,” admonished a distraught Jack, the youngest one, fighting tears.

“And what would he do? Grope around blindly?” scoffed Max, ever the loyal advocate for his elder brother. “He made the right call, Jack. From his vantage he was able to monitor her point of entry.”

Sam was quiet. His body slouched, like a worn out fighter, weakened by the the persistent, hard-punching frog-calls, the endless choke-hold of the cicadas.

“She’s always been afraid of water,” said Jack.

“Stop it, will you? Dad got her out okay, didn’t he?”

Which was true. Jerry would never have located Annie in the grassy depths of Jefferson Lake without the guidance of his eldest son. He stripped off his sneakers, his jeans, and plunged into the clouded water where Sam had indicated. There in the murky cold, Jerry mistook the feel of Annie’s form pressing against his hip for duckweed slime, or fish mucus, so diminutive and lifeless was her body. He paused when the amorphous mass solidified, became graspable. There was a brief serenity at that moment, and he took it in, inhaling that uncanny silence, as if it was a life’s supply of air for a man who’d never had a chance to breath.

By the time he raised his unresponsive daughter through the shimmering surface film and into the outstretched arms of his boys, the part of Annie’s brain that controls speech, the Broca’s area of the frontal lobe, had died from a lack of oxygen. Jerry quickly hoisted himself onto the pier and began alternating between mouth-to-mouth and rhythmic chest compressions. Softly, without visible reaction, Annie started breathing again, while her father, unaware she had revived, continued the resuscitation for several more minutes.

For several more years, his friends would say. For a lifetime, in fact.

Indeed, Jerry spent the remainder of his life trying to restore his darling little girl to full health, to resuscitate the child he so adored, until 20 years later (nearly to the minute), while sweeping leaves from the backyard pool, he found himself all alone, with no one to replenish the breath his own oxygen-depleted brain so badly demanded.

After Annie’s near drowning, Jerry would spare no expense on prosthetics, ramps, stairlifts, bathroom modifications, speech synthesisers, special eyeglasses for Annie’s deteriorating vision, aids for her declining hearing, medications, dietary supplements, physiotherapists, speech pathologists and every other recommended therapy, legitimate or fanciful, that might help his daughter’s condition.

But he was most proud of a contraption he devised with his own hands — part folding chair, part backpack, with special weights that lent some ballast to her wispy frame, allowing him to transport Annie wherever he wandered.

With Annie strapped to his back, he would take her to the homes he was inspecting. The once perfunctory visits, the cursory accounting of a house’s amenities, were now replaced, or rather expanded, enchanted, by new feelings, new encounters. As if unsettled by the oddly-shaped, two-headed realtor walking up the driveway, the rooftop gables would arch their backs, the front doors narrow suspiciously at his approach. Dew-sequinned lawns would call for his attention, and he would stand beside them for a long time, listening with Annie to the crickets, losing himself in their broadcast.

Do you hear that, Annie? Miniature monks engaged in prayer.

Eyes rolled to one side, Annie was often unresponsive. But after the incident at Jefferson lake, Jerry was convinced he and his daughter now experienced the world in the same way. Little things. The fact that every wall now had a belly button. Boop, Jerry would say when flipping on a light switch. The act of rolling down a window shade could expose an ancient text, provide toilet paper for a giant, or make a shrouded mummy disappear. Closet drawers said ahh to their doctor. A kitchen faucet could unleash a dragon.

To Sam, this change in his father, who now wore the expression of someone suppressing a secret, a humorous secret, provided clear evidence that Sam’s experimental treatment on Annie, the “forced aquatic adaption” as he considered it, had gone horribly wrong.

As it turned out, his father was more attentive to and more co-dependent on Annie than ever.

Less noticeable to Sam was the fact that Annie could no longer speak. In Sam’s mind, Annie’s physical flaws were statistical indicators of internal ones, mental issues which he believed likely to manifest as she grew older. The aphasia that followed her near-drowning, therefore, was not as alarming as it was to his parents, because Sam had never believed Annie would be able to construct meaningful ideas to begin with.

In fact, part of Sam’s experiment had worked. Annie no longer screamed when her father bathed her. Indeed, she now seemed most content in water, splashing and cooing joyfully. Jerry would sometimes wheel a portable tub into the living room and the two of them would soak together, watching classic films or listening to music. Too tepid? Too hot? It was a constant source of worry for him. Thermometers were notorious liars. Sinister sticks with slow smiles. Ultimately he had to rely on the sensitivity of his own skin.

It was during one of these moments together, awash in bathwater and music and flickering waves of light from the TV, that Jerry thought he noticed Annie’s finger quivering rhythmically against his wrist. A response to the music? The soft approach of an oboe? Or was it the timpani or snare-drum? That’s what it was. Its crispy snap. There was definitely something about the snare drum his daughter seemed to react to.

Another time in the tub, while watching the car chase scene in Chinatown together, he thought he detected her two fingers moving in a swift, alternating caress across his elbow. Two fingers, two cars. Was it just a coincidence? But then he noticed the same movement of her fingers during the train and car chase scene in The French Connection.

As time passed, he made more observations. Movie scenes cloaked in shadow, for example — dark corridors and lurking figures — seemed to elicit from Annie a delicate shudder across his thumb. Once, during a scene of a family sharing a meal together, Annie rubbed her knuckles against his own, as if to convey two opposing rows of seated figures, intermingling and clashing at the same time.

Was he imagining this? Or just paying more attention to her movements? Noticing the tiniest variations? A kissing scene produced a faint tap on his forefinger. Airplanes and spaceships seemed to inspire her to draw lines up his arm, as if tracing their take-offs. To Jerry, her gestures could be precise. Once, as Doris Day walked down a New York street in Pillow Talk, he felt two distinct prods to his inner wrist.

Annie, he realised, had noticed the heels Doris was wearing.

“Nice, eh?” he said. “Would you like some stilettos like that for yourself?”

Yes, Annie affirmed.

A fervent scratching of his arm was her laughter. The languid flutter of her fingers across his chest, like vaporous rain, conveyed to Jerry her sorrow, her tears.

But there was confusion, too. Bewilderment, misinterpretation. Did the swipe of a hand reflect the drawing of her bedroom drapes, as he supposed? Or did Annie wish to convey the more sublime connotation of the dawn’s emergent glow behind it? Either way, Jerry began to project himself into the vastness of Annie’s interior realm. He discovered the inscrutable depths of her whimsical humour. He travelled the boundless horizons of her imagination.

“No comment, Sam?”

His father, Sam knows, wasthe only person who could possibly chronicle Annie’s story. Which is why he also knows Annie’s story can never be told.

Maybe you should ask her yourself, Liza, he wants to say, bitterness creeping up on him. Seems like a good response. Or maybe — look, Liza, I love my sister. She’s very special. We all love her. Or maybe he could give a meaningful gesture to camera in her honour. Speak Annie’s language, his fingers fluttering across his chest.

But there are far more important matters for him to address right now. His company, for example. His investors. The future of the world. He tells Eliza he’s sorry, but he has another appointment. Which is fine with Eliza. She’s gathered more than enough kindling, she believes, gently touching her chrysanthemums, for her Beckerstaffers to set the world afire.

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The above excerpt is human-crafted. Any company or individual owning technology which uses any part of the text for the purpose of mimicking human intelligence without the express written permission of its author is liable to legal action resulting in a fine of no less than the value of a human life.