No Country for Old Men (2005) and The Road (2006) are by far McCarthy’s most famous books. Both are stories of a man trying to survive and protect a loved one against evil—one evil man in NCOM and the lawlessness of a collapsed society in The Road. The books don’t only owe their popularity to their literary merit, but to their accessibility, film adaptations (mainly for NCOM), and promotion in general media, like when the author of Blood Meridian sat for an interview with Oprah Winfrey:

McCarthy was unfamiliar with the exercise and its trivial questions but he did his best to respond respectfully and thoughtfully:

How do you know when it’s time to let it go, how do you know when the book is set, you’re done?

You just know, you told the story and that’s it. (…) The same thing that tells you what to write tells you when to stop writing it.

Another hilarious part is when he mentions John Nash:

(…) he dreamt he was having dinner with John Nash.

John Nash?

Yeah everybody knows John Nash because there was a film made a about him, A Beautiful Mind

Uh-huh

In that same excerpt, he loses the poor Oprah when he talks about the role of subsconcious in language and communication. The relevant concept is in fact the unconscious rather the subsconcious, but she didn’t notice, instead interjecting “it’s that brain thing again”, and unconvincingly commenting that she loves” the “thought” of subconscious being older than language. Interestingly, subunconscioue and language is a topic he wrote about much later in the only essay he ever published, the 2017 Kekulé Problem:

Why the snake? Some anthropologists allegedly witnessed ayahuasca-drinking shamans dreaming of snakes whereas they lived in snakeless places—like Hawaii—and concluded that they were a representation of the DNA’s double helix:

That theory later inspired the late French sci-fi writer Maurice Dantec, in his ambitious but very confused novel Babylon Babies,

But back to McCarthy’s books:

No Country for Old Men (2005)

The title comes from the opening line of Yeats’s 1926 poem Sailing to Byzantium. As far as I know, McCarthy never explicitly confirmed the reference, but coincidence seems implausible; even more so when the poem is strikingly McCarthyesque, and arguably fits The Road even better than NCOM:

The first version of NCOM was a screenplay that, like Cities of the Plains, failed to convince Hollywood filmmakers. McCarthy then turned it into a novel, which Coen brothers adapted into one of the greatest films. The unverified story is that the Coens somehow came across NCOM before its publication, whether through the screenplay of the novel. A lot has already been written about the film, the differences from the novel, Javier Bardem’s genius cast as Chigurh, etc. If you haven't read the book, read it first, then watch the film.

The screenplay’s legacy is unmistakable in NCOM’s highly cinematic prose; McCarthy lingers on minute gestures and actions and writes detailed descriptions of landscapes and plants. Consider for example this passage, where Moss hides a bag of money in a motel room’s air duct:

It sometimes get even more terse, here with only succinct fragments:

(Okay, you could argue that there’s similar dry camera-eye descriptive passages in many of his previous books but I think it’s more prominent in NCOM; it also lacks a lot of content that wouldn’t serve a screenplay.)

Like The Passenger alternates between chapters following Bobby Western and italicized chapters about his sister Alicia and her visions, NCOM alternates between the main story, told in a mostly omniscient third person, and Sheriff Bell's italicized first-person monologues (roughly 10 to 15% of the novel.) Bell's chapters are written retrospectively, post the novel’s events, reflecting on his career and on his inability to understand let alone confront what Chigurh represents.

Although NCOM initially presents itself as plot-driven, I think it's ultimately a (Bell-)character-driven novel. The thriller plot is there to illuminate (actually, to darken) the sheriff’s worldview and the way it collapses under the weight of the violence he witnesses. So let's look at the characters, in reverse order of appearance in the novel.

Moss

Set in 1980, NCOM opens with welder Llewelyn Moss hunting antelopes in the Texas desert, foreshadowing the novel's predator–prey dynamic. He stumbles upon the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong where he finds a bag full of cash. He takes it back to the trailer he shares with his wife, nineteen-year-old Carla Jean.

At the crime scene, one wounded Mexican man, barely alive in an SUV, begged him for water but Moss had none. During the night, he drives back to the scene with a jerrycan of water, but predictably it doesn’t go as planned: the man is dead, other men are there and they’ve very much alive:

That's the novel's premise: an act of compassion and/or guilt that backfires, turning Moss into prey hunted by the dopedealers for their money back, facing the irrevocable consequences of his decisions, a predicament common to Cities of the Plain and The Counselor. That’s close to a cliché start, but two characters elevate the novel beyond airport literature:

Chigurh

Anton Chigurh is the psychopathic, placid hitman that at the start of the novel carries a captive bolt pistol (as used to kill cattle) and its air tank (the size of a scuba tank) and kills people with it in a way that leaves a hole in their body but without a bullet staying inside or going through, which confuses the police investigating his murders. The man has no documented backstory or geographical provenance. Even the name “Chigurh” seems made-up by McCarthy (there’s a theory that it’s a pun with “chigger”.)

Chigurh is a evil man, but principled man, with his personal concept of accountability and an unalterable acceptance of fate’s unpredictability, whose absurdity is best seen in the coin toss scene. He’s otherwise a fairly one-dimensional type, with little interest in life's pleasures and only driven by his mission and his survival. He kills by necessity or perceived necessity as per his logic, but he appears to neither enjoy nor dislike the murders. So he’s not very empathetic, but he’s not really sadistic either, he just doesn't care, a nihilist.

McCarthy clearly defines him as the absolute evil, or Satan’s incarnation. When his former boss tries to get another man to stop him, he refers to him as an invincible man:

Later in the novel, McCarthy—via Sheriff Bell’s words—indirectly points to Chigurh as an incarnation of Satan:

And on the very first page of the novel, Bell calls him a “prophet of destruction”:

What transpires here is that Chigurh (and everything he represents and embodies) is a catalyst of Bell’s retirement as a sheriff, and a literary device supporting the main book’s story, which in my opinon is Bell’s—when Moss and Chigurh’s story is the parable behind it.

Bell

Bell is both the sheriff investigating the murders surrounding Moss's discovery of the money and the narrator of the novel's italicized first-person chapters. Bell is the sheriff of Terrell County, a real Texas county, based in the county seat Sanderson (~700 inhabitants) where Moss lives in the (fictional) Desert Aire Trailer Park:

Bell's chapters are the core of the book. They're largely absent from the film, yet they're the novel's real statement: the small kernel hidden beneath the sprawling Moss-Chigurh thriller. Read superficially, Bell sounds like the grumpy old man lamenting that the world used to be better: crime is worse, people are crueler, nobody respects the law anymore, etc. It's easy to mistake him for another nostalgic sheriff reminiscing about better times.

Bell is certainly conservative, somewhat religious, and attached to an older moral order. But reducing him to the cliché of the reactionary small-town Texas sheriff misses almost everything interesting about him. He’s not blaming the times as much as he’s blaming himself, acknowledging his difficulty to cope with the times and the violence, which he’d faced early in his life when serving in WW2. Reviewers are often tempted to reduce Bell to this idealist nostalgic character, though; for example, in this review by Annie Proulx in The Guardian (with my emphasis):

Good ol’ boys come in assorted flavours, from the bullying top dog to those who, through an in-built sense of fairness and justice founded on Christian values and local traditions, earn the affection of the common people. Bell is the second kind of good old boy, but he has come to think of bygone days as idyllic. (He obviously has not read McCarthy’s earlier books.)

That reading would make more sense if NCOM existed in isolation, but it doesn’t. McCarthy’s earlier novels leave little doubt about his view of violence. Blood Meridian presents it not as a product of modern society or failed politics but as something intrinsic to human nature. Bell isn’t mourning the arrival of evil. He’s mourning his inability to keep pace with it. His exhaustion is less ideological than professional: the fatigue of a border county sheriff confronting forces beyond the scale of his county. He’s not blaming the government or anyone else than him.

A reason why Bell isn’t bitter and depressed is that he’s an empathetic man, with an overall positive outlook on life in general, happily married and grateful for it:

Bell's deepest wound, however, predates Chigurh. Near the end of the novel he confesses to the reader the guilt he’s carried since WWII, where he received a Bronze Star he believes was unwarranted. Becoming sheriff was in part an attempt to repay a debt he feels he still owes. The Coens’ film makes up for the relative absence of Bell in the film by ending with this encounter and a scene with Loretta, Bell’s wife, which isn’t in the book.

No Country for Old Men is a great title, but the book could also have been called Sheriff Bell’s Confessions, both in the ordinary sense of confessing his failures and guilt, and in the Augustinian sense of an introspective meditation on memory and morality and time.

Bell’s monologues repeatedly return to the same universal, existential questions that philosophers have always wrestled with: guilt, memory, the burden of time, and whether a human life can ever truly be understood in retrospect. This reminded me most of Saint Augustines’ Confessions, wherein most of Book XI is largely about the nature of time, with several parts that Sheriff Bell wouldn’t argue with; Who shall hold the heart of man, that it may stand still, and see how eternity ever still-standing, neither past nor to come, uttereth the times past and to come? (Book XI). Augustines’ Confessions also include a part about “stage plays”, or fictional/imagined stories in general, which I find fitting to quote in its entirety:

Stage-plays also carried me away, full of images of my miseries, and of fuel to my fire. Why is it, that man desires to be made sad, beholding doleful and tragical things, which yet himself would no means suffer? yet he desires as a spectator to feel sorrow at them, and this very sorrow is his pleasure. What is this but a miserable madness? for a man is the more affected with these actions, the less free he is from such affections. Howsoever, when he suffers in his own person, it uses to be styled misery: when he compassionates others, then it is mercy. But what sort of compassion is this for feigned and scenical passions? for the auditor is not called on to relieve, but only to grieve: and he applauds the actor of these fictions the more, the more he grieves. And if the calamities of those persons (whether of old times, or mere fiction) be so acted, that the spectator is not moved to tears, he goes away disgusted and criticising; but if he be moved to passion, he stays intent, and weeps for joy.

May you be moved by McCarthy's book as much as I was.

The Road (2006)

The Road is set in what is usually called a post-apocalyptic world, where society, the rule of law, and nearly all infrastructure have vanished. Most human beings seem to have vanished too. Among the survivors are the novel’s unnamed protagonists: a father, “the man,” and his son, “the child,” who calls him Papa. They walk south through a dead America, pushing a shopping cart loaded with blankets and their few remaining supplies.

McCarthy dedicated The Road “For John Francis McCarthy,” his son, born in 1999. It shows. The Road is the story of the man and the child. The mother is gone; she chose death:

I haven’t seen the film adaptation. I’ve heard it’s good but not great. But the main reason is that I don’t want it to overwrite my own image of the characters and their world before I reread the novel.

I must also mention the excellent graphic novel adaptation, by French artist Manu Larcenet.

Ashes

Unlike NCOM, The Road has almost no plot to speak of. Some devastating event has occurred but its precise nature is unexplained. We know only this:

Whatever happened has left the world, or perhaps only the country or the region, in ashes, literally. “I have become like dust and ashes” (Job 30:19). Ash recurs throughout the novel, carrying with it the language of mourning, mortality, penance, and the remains of a world that once was.

Like here:

And here, where a single flake becomes “the last host of christendom”:

The Road begins with destruction and it ends with creation.

Death

Death is omnipresent in The Road, often appearing most plainly in the child’s questions:

Most people have already died. Those who remain seem unlikely to survive for long:

Death is no longer an exceptional event but the ordinary background of the protagonists, something the child must repeatedly ask about because it governs every decision they make.

But The Road isn’t devoid of hope; hope for warmth, food, shelter, survival:

God

Even God seems to have vanished. Or has he?

The world appears abandoned not only by civilization but by divine order and any form of grace. Yet religious language persists: ashes, hosts, prophets, fire, goodness, judgment. God may be absent, but the need to speak of him survives.

One day the man and the child meet an old man who calls himself Ely, perhaps an echo of the prophet Elijah:

“There is no God and we are his prophets” is one of a McCarthy’s characteristic paradoxes. It echoes the rabbinic idea of a God who entrusts men with the work of judgment rather than intervening forever from heaven, as in the Talmudic story of the Oven of Akhnai. Ely gives that idea its post-apocalyptic form: God may still be there, but men remain accountable for the truth.

The fire

The child will live. He is the one who resists the man’s violence, who’s troubled by the suffering of strangers, and who insists that being one of the “good guys” must mean more than just surviving. He is also the one who must “carry the fire”:

The fire is life, conscience, innocence, memory, love, and perhaps the last surviving fragment of the sacred. The father protects the child’s body, but the child protects the meaning of their survival. Without him, the book would be as boring at the last Mad Max films.

The end

The final paragraph of the novel may be the finest ending McCarthy ever wrote:

Featured image: The Great Day of His Wrath, by John Martin.

“That was not sleeping.” All the Pretty Horses begins with a burial and ends with another. In between, a boy crosses into Mexico and returns having learnt that heroism mostly works in fiction. This is McCarthy's version of the classical hero’s journey and coming-of-age arc.

Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy includes these three novels:

• All the Pretty Horses (1992)

• The Crossing (1994)

• Cities of the Plain (1998)

(The name “The Border Trilogy” isn’t a retroactive nickname. It came from McCarthy himself and was supported by his publisher Alfred A. Knopf.)

The border is of course the US–Mexico border, southwest Texas in ATPH and New Mexico in the two other books. ATPH is the story of 16-year-old John Grady Cole, The Crossing is the story of another 16-year-old, Billy Parham. After these two stories, John Grady and Billy are brought together as the two main protagonists of COTP. The stories are otherwise independent and without others character in common. You don’t need to read the first two books before reading the last, but COTP gains much from knowing the two men’s backstories.

These are relatively straightforward stories, by McCarthy’s standards; a common pattern is love or attachment then disillusion and death. Uncommon for McCarthy are the romances central to the plots of ATPH and COTP where an American cowboy falls for a Mexican woman—archetypically pure and depraved, respectively. The Crossing is romance-free and instead more about brotherly love and attachment for a she-wolf. It has way more symbolism and mysticism and is the most ambitious of the three.

The writing style is a clear departure from his previous books. It’s not as oppressive and solemn as Blood Meridian, and not as dense and detailed as Suttree. McCarthy feels more confident in his lyricism, storytelling, and his characters. With the exception of Suttree, it’s the first McCarthy book with real character interiority. These changes make the Border Trilogy much more approachable and contributed to the popular success of ATPH, after a National Book Award that turned McCarthy from a cult novelist into a public literary figure.

The trilogy has been described as an elegy for the American western cowboy lifestyle—horsemanship, brotherhood, honor, restraint—and I agree with that. A more contemporary temptation I’ve noticed is to see a statement about the failure of masculinity. That feels too narrow and self-serving, for McCarthy isn’t doing that. Instead, he gives the cowboy world its beauty and places in its harsh historical context and physical environment to salvage its dignity rather than to condemn it.

The Border Trilogy is more broadly an ode to the end of a certain West, with cowboys on horseback and older forms of violence. McCarthy doesn’t romanticize young Americans riding south and crossing the border in search of a new frontier or of some authenticity that postwar America would lack. Nor does he treat the US–Mexico border as a contemporary political question, though it’s always been one. In his books, violence and conflict are older and more continuous than politics. The cartel brutality of No Country for Old Men and The Counselor is not depicted as morally worse or better than the violence of Blood Meridian; it is another historical form of the same human darkness.

Chronology note

I bought my copy of ATPH in a small bookshop in a small Arizona town in 2010 and I read it during travels in the Southwest. It’s the first Vintage International edition from 1993, a nice object in itself.

I only read The Crossing in 2022, in that Picador edition with a terrible cover where the word “beautiful” is more prominent than the title and McCarthy’s name. Not sure what they were thinking.

COTP is the McCarthy novel I read last, as late as 2024, in the newest 2022 Picador edition with its minimalist cover. By then I had already read McCarthy’s final novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris. As I started working on this post, I realized I had more vivid memories of The Crossing than of COTP, except for its last chapter and epilogue, the final sixty pages of the book.

Disclaimer and credits

• To avoid spoiling too much of the stories I’ll try to focus on events happening in the first half of the books. But it won’t be totally spoiler-free.

• I borrowed some observations from the articles in Perspectives About Cormac McCarthy, namely

  • All the Pretty Horses: John Grady Cole’s Expulsion from Paradise, by Gail Moore Morrison.

  • The Road and the Matrix: The World as a Tale in The Crossing, by Dianne C. Luce.

  • The Last of the Trilogy: First Thoughts on Cities of the Plain, by Edwin T. Arnold.

All the Pretty Horses

All the Pretty Horses opens on September 13, 1949, almost exactly a century after Blood Meridian’s events. It looks like a very conventional Bildungsroman, beginning with John Grady being rejected by his mother and girlfriend then riding South with a friend. Then they meet Jimmy Blevins, the boy who’ll be a sidekick and disruptor. You understand very early on that he’s trouble.

As in Blood Meridian, the landscape is as much a character as the human protagonists. John Grady Cole and Lacey Rawlins leave from near San Angelo, Texas and reach a ranch in the Mexican state of Coahuila near Cuatro Ciénegas, which today is about 380 miles by road. In the excerpts below you’ll note “the sun to the west lay blood red”:

John Grady and Lacey find work as ranch hands at la Hacienda de Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción. As Gail Moore Morrison notes in her essay, this name is an “ironic double entendre” for a place where the owner, Don Hector Rocha, “has conceived a breeding strategy to produce a superior cutting horse by crossing his quarter horse mares with a thoroughbred stallion.” Morrison later hilariously writes that

John Grady is, of course, banished from the hacienda because Señor Rocha is not interested in a similar experiment in crossbreeding between his daughter Alejandra and the Texas import.

Alejandra is McCarthy’s Juliet: the impossible beloved, the daughter of a local aristocracy. She has a reputation and a family line to maintain, which her aunt tries to explain to her, the same aunt who will intercede in John Grady’s favor. John Grady first sees her riding her black Arabian mare:

You know what’s going to happen; they’ll fall in love but the relationship will be doomed; John Grady and Lacey will get in trouble (thank you Blevins), and Alejandra won’t marry John Grady. Despite all his heroic traits (horseriding, physical strength, chess skills, etc.) he won’t show the efficacy of a hero and won’t save the princess—quite the other way around. Like I said I’d like to avoid too many spoilers so I won’t tell much more.

I can’t not mention the 2000 film, directed by Billy Bob Thornton and starring Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz. I haven’t watched the whole thing, but I saw the trailer and a few scenes. It seems earnest and fairly faithful to the book, and Jimmy Blevins is well cast, close to how I imagined him. But in my opinion, John Grady and Lacey look way too clean and angelic compared to the book, and the love story badly suffers from the casting: Damon and Cruz were 28 and 25 but played 16-year-olds, whose youth and sexual innocence are essential to the story. The film therefore lacks the romanticism of that first love. And ironically, Blevins is played by a 16-year-old actor, though the character is 13 and pretending to be 16.

To conclude on something funnier: loving Reddit about ATPH:

The Crossing

The Crossing isn’t as famous as ATPH, but it’s the most ambitious of the three novels, and also my favorite. It’s the one I remember most vividly and the one I now want to finish rereading as I work on this post. Billy and Boyd Parham may not have John Grady Cole’s outward charisma, but The Crossing reaches depths the other two books don’t. I find it more poetic, more understated, and the strongest of the trilogy. But the tagline of this blog applies: “This is just my opinion, I am sure yours is completely different.”

In the late 1930s, brothers Billy and Boyd Parham (16 and 14) live with their parents on an isolated cattle ranch in the Animas Valley in Hidalgo County in southwest New Mexico. A wolf was spotted attacking cattle. They set traps to catch the wolf. They end up catching her (a pregnant she-wolf) but then Billy feels a spiritual connection—for lack of better words—with the wolf and chooses not to kill her. Instead, he decides to take her back to her (allegedly) home in Mexico.

The wolf isn’t just an animal but a genuine character. The NYT review even writes that “none of the women in these novels are particularly believable—the most complex and sympathetic female character in the trilogy may be a wolf.” See for example these lines:

A little geographic context: the red-bordered area on the map below is Hidalgo County. The thick black line is the US–Mexico border, and the vertical dotted line is the Sonora–Chihuahua border. Billy and Boyd travel through both Mexican states, and the book mentions in particular the Sonora towns of Bavispe and Bacerac that you see at the bottom-left.

Even more than ATPH, The Crossing is a road narrative, roughly structured as three crossings for the US–Mexican border (in this direction, so technically there are six border crossings), with several disjointed subplots. To avoid revealing too much of the story, I’ll just say that the first crossing is about a wolf, the second is about horses (whereas in ATPH, Blevins’ stolen bay horse is one of the causes of the heros’ troubles, here Billy and Boyd’s second crossing into Mexico is related to stolen horses), and the third is even more sinister than the second and is about a man’s remains. These journeys span several years and the book finishes around the time when WWII begins.

ATPH is not exactly a happy story, but The Crossing is even more melancholic. Hope and life are hidden in its philosophical passages, encounters and tales from the many picaresque characters that Billy and Boyd meet on their journey: Indians, Mormons, gypsies, fortunetellers, opera singers, blind men, bandits, Mexican peasants and villagers, etc.

Let me conclude with this excerpt from the gypsy man’s story, near the end of the book. The gypsy tells Billy a story about salvage workers trying to determine the “true” identity of a crashed canvas biplane when a second identical one is discovered ruined in the mountains, in an allegory of Billy’s life (and, probably unintentionally, reminiscent of McCarthy's penultimate novel The Passenger, whose main character is a salvage diver investigating an elusive plane crash):

The gypsy splits his story into three parts, where the first is what allegedly really happened to the plane, the second is someone’s perspective/speculation, and the third is the ‘meta’ story, as we’d say today:

Cities of the Plain

McCarthy first wrote COTP as a standalone screenplay in 1984. When the film didn’t get made, he decided to write the backstories of the two main characters. Edwin T. Arnold’s article in Perspectives discusses the differences between the screenplay and the published novel.

The book’s cinematic origin is easy to feel; it’s shorter and more dialogue-driven than the first two volumes and many scenes already seem half-staged: cowboys talking in bunkhouses, men crossing into Juárez, etc. Film director Andrew Dominik later tried to adapt COTP and courted James Franco for the project, but Franco—who tried to bring Blood Meridian to screens—turned it down. I’m not sure a standalone COTP film would be a good idea either. The plot can stand alone but may be too shallow without the characters’ background. Still, with the right actors, some of the dialogue could work on screen:

Here Billy is Billy Parham, from The Crossing, and the “friend” that Eduardo mentions is John Grady Cole from ATPH. Both boys are 16 at the start of their respective books (ATPH takes place in the late 1940s while The Crossing does in the late 1930s.) The events of COTP start in 1952, thus John Grady is around 19 and Billy around 28. They work in a ranch north of El Paso, in New Mexico, across Mexico's Ciudad Juárez—which always reminds me of Bolaño's 2666.

COTP is shorter novel than the first two books of the trilogy, and is often perceived as the weakest of the three. A common criticism is John Grady’s “replay” of a doomed romance, this time with the (fittingly named) prostitute Magdalena, as Arnold comments in his essay:

I think the greatest part of COTP is its last third; the confrontation between John Grady and Eduardo, and even more memorably its epilogue. The final pages provide closure not only to the novel and its characters, but to the trilogy and its reflection on the Western “cowboy life” (again, for lack of a less reductive term), where the protagonist meets a prophetic voice like the preachers of The Crossing:

I remember that shortly after reading COTP I watched The Counselor, the not especially memorable Ridley Scott film written by McCarthy with Michael Fassbender, Javier Bardem, Cameron Diaz, and Penelope Cruz. (The Counselor is cinematographically superior to All the Pretty Horses [see below] but not as good as the Coens’ No Country for Old Men, notwithstanding [or because of?] its all-star cast) In The Counselor, the Mexican crime boss bears a philosophical resemblance to his counterpart in COTP (Eduardo, the brothel’s owner) and both appear near the end to lecture the American hero on idealism, violence, and reality. In The Counselor, what the Mexican boss says is very McCarthy and not far from the world of COTP:

– When it comes to grief, the normal rules of exchange do not apply, because grief transcends value. A man would give entire nations to lift grief off his heart, and yet, you cannot buy anything with grief. Because grief is worthless.

– Why are you telling me this?

– Because you continue to deny the reality of the world you’re in.

In COTP, when John Grady fights Eduardo in Juárez, the Mexican dispenses similar advice:

Interestingly, ATPH also has a similar scene, when John Grady is interrogated by the Mexican Captain, though it happens in the first third of the novel rather than its conclusion and is therefore less dramatic. Short excerpt:

Next

I’m now going to finish rereading The Crossing, and after that I’ll turn to McCarthy’s most famous books, No Country for Old Men and The Road.

This is probably the post in the series I most enjoyed writing. Part of that was the pleasure of reopening the books; the first ATPH pages, the late timeless gravity of COTP, and basically anything from The Crossing. It also reminded me that I’ve meant to travel to NM and TX for year. I might finally go later this year.

The Border Trilogy isn’t McCarthy at his most terrifying or his most extreme in any way, quite the contrary. It’s where he’s the closest to a reasonable, popular writer, and perhaps where he’s at his the most sentimental. NCFOM will keep us near the TX-Mexico border, a thriller-like story, a drier and more minimalist prose, and a villain who’s a modern incarnation of Blood Meridian’s Holden. And then The Road, which is in some ways more brutal than Holden and Chigurh combined.

Still, having worked on critical assets definition and governance (the harder part), the notions of HVA and high impact system—which I wasn’t familiar with—piqued my interest. That’s what this post is about.

Disclaimers: I’m not an expert, this post is only the result of my research and reading that I’m sharing for anyone interested. Let me know what I missed or got wrong.

Context and scope

HVA and high impact system are not mutually exclusive. A system can qualify as both, as one of the two, or neither. Whereas a high impact system is… an information system (storing or processing information), and HVA can either be such a system or the information itself.

HVA and high impact system can in principle apply to both classified and unclassified systems. They are (mostly) applied to civilian, non-military, non-National Security agencies, and systems thereof—for example, about HVAs, OMB’s M-19-03 writes “agencies are only required to report their non-national security HVAs to DHS.”

High impact system

A high impact system is exactly what it says it is, as the EO defines:

The notion of high impact system is not new. You’ll find the term (also, and more correctly, spelled “high-impact system”) in other Federal government documents.

“High impact” refers to the impact defined in the FIPS 199 categorization (which doesn't apply to classified and NSS systems):

Doing more genealogical research, FIPS 199 (issued in 2004) can be traced back to FISMA 2002, the text signed into law by George W. Bush in December 2002, which tasked NIST with developing federal security standards and guidelines.

High value asset (HVA)

HVA is a less straightforward and more interesting notion than HIS. It's not unrelated to FISMA 2014, the update and modernization of its 2002 ancestor, through three iterations of OMB publications:

In October 2015, following FISMA 2014 (more precisely, its “Cybersecurity Sprint”), M-16-03 (where the M means memorandum) instructs agencies to “Immediately identify agency specific High Value Assets (HVAs) and assess the security protections around those HVAs,” without giving a clear definition of an HVA.

In December 2016, M-17-09 defines an HVA as follows:

Note that, as I wrote in introduction, an HVA can be a system (such as a web application) or data (like “list of users from agency XYZ”).

M-17-09 also gives guidelines for planning, identification, categorization, prioritization, remediation, and reporting of HVAs.

Like information classification level, this definition is mostly relative to the impact of a compromise, rather than to the nature of the system/data.

You’ll see that those memoranda are quite high-level, specifying the what rather than the how. That’s where DHS and CISA (created in 2018) come into play, via their binding operational directives (a BOD is “a compulsory direction to federal, executive branch, departments and agencies for purposes of safeguarding federal information and information systems.”). After the now-revoked BOD 16-01, the authoritative document is BOD 18-02: Securing High Value Assets. It’s a short piece that describes agencies’ responsibilities vis-à-vis DHS, such as submitting a point of contact to DHS and participating in DHS-led assessments (CISA is under DHS.)

In December 2018, M-19-03 (superseding M-17-09) providers further guidance on the HVA program, notably relative to

• governance, where the head of agency is accountable for designating their HVAs and internal responsible parties/teams.

• “designation” (though I think “definition and scope” would be a better term), broadening the scope to consider

  • the value of the data/system for adversaries (relative to confidentiality),

  • the mission criticality of the data/system (generally more relative to integrity and availability).

M-19-03 also provides a more extensive breakdown of responsibilities between agencies, DHS (oversight, requirements definition, etc.), and GSA (mostly bureaucracy).

Each agency’s Inspector General (IG), or an external auditor selected by the IG, performs the annual independent FISMA evaluation, including HVAs'. management; some IGs also conduct HVA-specific audits.

For example, DHS’ IG found that… CISA didn’t manage its HVAs properly, for a selected HVA system:

Finally, the last related development I’ve found is CISA's June 2026 BOD 26-04: Implementation Guidance for Prioritizing Security Updates Based on Risk, which defines prioritization guidance:

GPT 5.5 on Too Much Crypto

Security is rarely free. More controls usually means more computation, more energy consumption, more latency, and more expensive hardware. Cryptography isn’t much different, and like every engineering discipline it has to balance cost against benefit. Cryptography often forgets this principle.

The reason is understandable. Nobody wants to design the algorithm that gets broken. If adding a few extra rounds makes an attack even less likely, why not?

The problem is that round numbers are never adjusted to the reality of cryptanalysis progress, or lack thereof. After years of analysis, algorithms retain increasingly overgenerous safety margins that reflect their designers’ initial—warranted—conservatism.

The paper Too Much Crypto asks a simple question: have we been too conservative?

Rather than speculating, the paper looks at decades of cryptanalysis of major symmetric primitives. The results are surprisingly consistent. While attacks steadily improve, the distance between the best known attacks and the parameters used in practice often remains huge.

ChaCha is perhaps the clearest example. The version deployed almost everywhere, ChaCha20, uses twenty rounds. Yet the best cryptanalysis remains far from threatening the full design, and even reduced-round variants appear remarkably robust. One naturally wonders whether twenty rounds were ever really necessary, or whether a smaller number could have delivered essentially the same practical security at a lower cost.

Keccak, the algorithm behind SHA-3, tells a similar story. Its permutation was designed with an extremely comfortable security margin—and JP is in part responsible for that—and years of cryptanalysis have only reinforced confidence in the design. This robustness is good news, but it also raises the question of whether some applications are paying for much more security than they actually need.

The argument is not that cryptographers made mistakes. Quite the opposite: conservative design has served the field exceptionally well.

But conservatism has a cost.

A useful comparison is civil engineering. Bridges are built with safety margins because unexpected events happen. Nobody would advocate building a bridge that barely supports its advertised load. On the other hand, designing every highway bridge to support a fleet of aircraft carriers would not be considered good engineering.

Cryptography should be no different.

This philosophy influenced the design of BLAKE3. Instead of simply inheriting the conservative parameters of earlier hash functions, BLAKE3 takes advantage of what decades of cryptanalysis have taught us. Its compression function uses fewer rounds, while its tree structure exploits the parallelism of modern processors to achieve dramatically better performance. The result is a hash function that is significantly faster than SHA-3 or BLAKE2.

Despite not being a NIST standard, BLAKE3 has been adopted in projects such as LLVM, Rust’s Cargo, OpenZFS, CCache, Cloudflare services, blockchains, ZK proof systems, and many other performance-critical systems. The attraction is straightforward: if a design can provide ample security at a fraction of the computational cost, that is simply good engineering.

The point of Too Much Crypto is therefore not that modern cryptography is “too secure”. Security margins are valuable, and predicting future attacks is notoriously difficult.

The point is that security should be treated like every other engineering requirement. Once a design is comfortably beyond any realistic attack, adding another large safety margin should require justification rather than being the default choice. Unhealthy paranoia isn’t good risk management, and it isn’t good cryptographic engineering either. Sometimes, enough crypto is enough.

The controversial claim is not that cryptographers are too cautious, but that the history of cryptanalysis suggests they may be much more cautious than the evidence warrants.

“McCarthy’s magnum violent lyric masterpiece.”

“One of the best 20th century American novels.”

“Classified as an anti-Western.”

“Barbarously poetic odyssey.”

“An apocalypse without revelation.”

etc. So much has been written about Blood Meridian, from its litany of violence and the demonic Judge Holden to its historical accuracy and religious layers. Hard to find what more to say.

BM is the first McCarthy book I read, in the 2000s. Around that time I’d been reading James Ellroy’s L.A. trilogy and other novels about grimy homicides, so the shock was less about the bloodiness than the lyricism and scale of McCarthy's text. Yet I thought “are all his books that dark?” and shortly after I read All the Pretty Horses and The Road—the latter arguably not less dark, though.

This is the only copy left of BM on my shelves. I used to own three but I gave one to a friend and the other one must have been lost or forgotten because I can’t find. The cover of the lost volume wasn’t as unfortunate as that edition’s. I guess the publisher thought it was a good idea to add that review quote on the cover, but I think it’s terrible and McCarthy would’ve hated it. Instead of these cringeworthy lines they could have added the full title of the book: Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West, like on this superior cover:

I’ve read BM several times and every time I read the first and last page at least three times, so I almost remember them by heart. This opening is an obvious parallel to Child of God and wants you to think that the kid won’t be unlike Lester Ballard:

As you’ve figured from that excerpt, BM’s writing style isn’t Suttree’s; drier, more confident, biblical, and rich with McCarthysms like minimal punctuation, neologisms, and stripped of the picaresque warmth of Suttree. BM also includes some short dialogues in Spanish. These seem to bother many readers—including several Redditors in r/cormacmccarthy—but there isn’t that much Spanish and it’s often straightforward to understand even with no Spanish command. Look at the left page below, for example: “somos amigos” and “De dónde viene?”

Blood Meridian is probably McCarthy's most layered work. In its plotlessness, moral rawness, geography, historical grounding, and the pagan theology that Holden espouses throughout, which the last section of this post will discuss. But before that let’s talk about the two men who lead the BM odyssey.

Glanton

BM’s central character is again nameless, the kid from the incipit above, as he joins a group of bounty hunters, actually scalphunters, whose leader Joel Glanton is an actual historical figure. The events happen right after the Mexican War, in 1848-1849, around the current US–Mexican border from East Texas to El Paso and across Chihuahua to Sonora and Arizona. This page from the Texas State Historical Association has a short biography of Glanton where we learn that “His fiancée was abducted, scalped, and killed by Lipan Apaches that year [1835].”

After getting in trouble in various places and enlisting in the army, Glanton gathered a small group of mercenaries later called Glanton’s gang, whose business is documented in the memoirs of American soldier Samuel Chamberlain, My Confession: Recollections of a Rogue. On pages 267-268 Chamberlain recounts his first encounter with Glanton:

In BM, Glanton’s gang encounters indigenous tribes in present USA and Mexico including Apaches, Comanches, Delawares, Gileños, Tiguas, Yumas (Quechans). The encounters are rarely peaceful:

His [Glanton’s] name punctuates any number of histories of the mid-nineteenth-century Southwest, and even when nameless his legend is unmistakable:

“[D]isplaced emigrants [were] turning into horse thieves, gamblers, and even murderers. One set up a business killing Apache Indians and selling scalps to the Mexican government for two hundred dollars each, and collecting two hundred and fifty for each prisoner. If Indians were scarce, he even killed Mexicans to profit from their scalps.”

His tale is unsettling, his misfit excess horrifying.

The above is from the article “What kind of indians was them?”: Some Historical Sources in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian by John Emil Sepich and published in the book Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, which also includes the articles A Reading of Blood Meridian and Gravers False and True: Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy.

In My Confession, Chamberlain doesn’t spare details about the real Glanton’s gang misdeeds:

The particular episode below is very BM-esque, and actually inspired a scene from McCarthy’s book:

Said scene in BM: while sitting around a bonfire, Glanton has a juggler (long story) draw tarot cards. The card vanishes from Glanton’s hand, then the old woman accompanying the juggler interprets it as “La carroza… Invertido”—the inverted Chariot, “card of war, of vengeance”:

Then Glanton loses his temper and tells her to shut up and draws his revolver. Then Holden (“like a great ponderous djinn”) steps through the fire and restrains him.

Glanton and many of his group found their demise by the hands of Yuma Indians at the Colorado River crossing in 1850, an event that McCarthy follows fairly closely in BM. From the TSHA biography of Glanton:

By 1850, however, it became increasingly difficult for the Glanton gang to find hostile Apaches, and they began attacking peaceful agricultural Indians in the vicinity of Fort El Norte. Finally, they turned to taking Mexican scalps for profit. As a result the Chihuahua government drove Glanton and his company into Sonora and put a bounty on his scalp. There he contracted with the authorities to fight the Indians, traded Indian scalps for bounties, and again resorted to taking Mexican scalps to increase his profit. He and his gang seized and operated a river ferry controlled by the Yuma Indians. While operating the ferry, they reportedly killed Mexican and American passengers alike for their money and goods. At dawn on April 23, 1850, the normally friendly Yuma got their revenge on the interloping entrepreneurs. They killed most of the ferry workers and slit Glanton's throat in his tent.

And as told in BM’s chapter XIX:

When they entered Glanton’s chamber he lurched upright and glared wildly about him. The small clay room he occupied was entirely filled with a brass bed he’d appropriated from some migrating family and he sat in it like a debauched feudal baron while his weapons hung in a rich array from the finials. Caballo en Pelo mounted into the actual bed with him and stood there while one of the attending tribunal handed him at his right side a common axe the hickory helve of which was carved with pagan motifs and tasseled with the feathers of predatory birds. Glanton spat.

Hack away you mean red nigger, he said, and the old man raised the axe and split the head of John Joel Glanton to the thrapple. When they entered the judge’s quarters they found the idiot and a girl of perhaps twelve years cowering naked in the floor.

That’s a good segue to our next protagonist.

Holden

The group leader Glanton isn’t a leader in McCarthy’s novel, neither is he the real villain—he’s not BM’s Lester Ballard or Anton Chigurh. Glanton is the gang’s nominal leader, but not he’s not its soul.

He’s not the character that BM is really about.

Meet Judge Holden, first name unknown, as Chamberlain describes him in his Confession on page 271. If you’ve read BM, the resemblance with the fictional Holden is disturbing—the real Holden wasn’t less depraved and cruel than McCarthy’s:

The second in command, now left in charge of [Glanton’s] camp, was a man of gigantic size called “Judge” Holden of Texas. Who or what he was no one knew but a cooler blooded villain never went unhung; he stood six feet six in his moccasins, had a large fleshy frame, a dull tallow colored face destitute of hair and all expression. His desires was blood and women, and terrible stories were circulated in camp of horrid crimes committed by him when bearing another name, in the Cherokee nation and Texas; and before we left Frontereras a little girl of ten years was found in the chapperal, foully violated and murdered. The mark of a huge hand on her little throat pointed him out as the ravisher as no other man had such a hand, but though all suspected, no one charged him with the crime.

Holden was by far the best educated man in northern Mexico; he conversed with all in their own language, spoke in several Indian lingos, at a fandango would take the Harp or Guitar from the hands of the musicians and charm all with his wonderful performance, and out-waltz any poblana of the ball. He was “plum centre” with rifle or revolver, a daring horseman, acquainted with the nature of all the strange plants and their botanical names, great in Geology and Mineralogy, in short another Admirable Crichton, and with all an arrant coward. Not but that he possessed enough courage to fight Indians and Mexicans or anyone where he had the advantage in strength, skill and weapons, but where the combat would be equal, he would avoid it if possible. I hated him at first sight, and he knew it, yet nothing could be more gentle and kind than his deportment towards me; he would often seek conversation with me and speak of Massachusetts and to my astonishment I found he knew more about Boston than I did.

BM’s Holden is at least as erudite and sadistic as the real Holden allegedly was. He enters BM when he enters the tent of a local Christian preacher, Reverent Green, wherein the kid is sitting with the audience: Judge Holden is an “enormous man dressed in an oilcloth slicker”, “bald as a stone and he had no trace of beard and he had no brows to his eyes nor lashes to them. He was close on to seven feet in height and he stood smoking a cigar even in this nomadic house of God and seemed to have removed his hat only to chase the rain from it for now he put it on again.” Holden’s first words is this monologue to the preacher’s audience:

Then a fight ensues and later at a bar when men ask Holden how he knew all that stuff he says he’d never seen nor heard about Reverent Green; “There was a stranger silence in the room. The men looked like mud effigies. Finally someone began to laugh. Then another. Soon they were all laughing together. Someone bought the judge a drink.”

Judge Holden is terrifying as he’s consistently associated with destruction and moral annihilation. More than Glanton, he often amplifies the gang’s descent into indiscriminate violence. But his violence isn’t from darkness and hatred; it’s from intensity, almost a celebration of existence, for he also embodies vitality, knowledge, enjoyment of art, dance, music, as allegedly the real Holden did—it looks like Chamberlain sensed that too. And that makes Holden more human and therefore even scarier.

Juan’s critiques

Blood Meridian is probably the most studied, analyzed, and written about book of McCarthy. You’ll find plenty of resources online, of uneven quality. Some of the most interesting and literary erudite comments I’ve read are from the French critic Juan Asensio, in his series of posts about BM, which I encourage you to read. Juan’s posts are in French but auto-translations to English will probably be decent. For the excerpts below I’ve used DeepL, with some manual tweaks to get the nuances right, and adding the original English excerpts from BM.

From Relecture de Méridien de sang de Cormac McCarthy:

While a novel like The Road has an obvious religious dimension, as I have established, Blood Meridian, a text that we can without exaggeration describe as overwritten because it is saturated with a multitude of references (to Manichaeism, esotericism, the Bible, geology, flora and fauna, geography, history, firearms, various Native American peoples, etc.), is characterized far more by the exploration of a sacred, auspicious theme, which cannot, however, be separated from the religious dimension, so numerous are the references—direct or indirect—to the latter.

The sacred is distinguished by its ambiguity, the constant reversal of the pure into the impure, the profane into the initiated, good into evil, darkness into light, and, one might say, the past into the future.

It is perhaps through this complex temporality that Blood Meridian most skillfully conveys its modernity—that is, its ambiguity, its openness to an infinite range of interpretive possibilities— and the strange feeling it cannot fail to provoke in the mind of the reader, as if the writer’s aim, with this strange and monstrous novel, had been to offer more than a novel, a prologue to a knowledge that nevertheless eludes us, whose very essence is to remain unrevealed, like messianism in Judaism: “There are three matters that come only by means of diversion of attention from those matters, and these are they: The Messiah, a lost item, and a scorpion” (Sanhedrin 97a.)

And later in the same post, about the part in chapter XIV with the famous Holden quote “Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.”:

Nothing can resist Judge Holden’s hold; his desire to know everything about the world can only mean a life-and-death struggle with creation, as he explains to Toadvine: “This is my claim,” he said. “And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation,” as if, through this explanation, McCarthy were once again emphasizing the possible identification between his character and the Devil, whom the Bible reminds us possesses the earth as an inheritance, whom he roams tirelessly, ensuring that not the slightest parcel of territory or soul escapes his empire. Holden goes on to declare: “The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.”

Once again, Judge Holden becomes the herald of a conception that advocates the subjugation of the entire universe, in order to eliminate all forms of the unknown, equated with a disorder capable of shattering the absolute logic of destiny.

Now I’ll let you read the book.

(The featured image is from Chamberlain’s book, captioned “Despair.”)

Before showing how to compute—as in, finding output values from input values—we need to know what we’ll compute with:

• Values that we’ll transform will be qubits.

• Transformation will be done with quantum gates.

Qubits

One qubit

A quantum bit can be in two basis states: one denoted 0, the other denoted 1. In a superposition state it’s neither 0 nor 1; it’s characterized by two values we’ll call α (alpha) and β (beta), and we write the qubit ψ (psi) as

The funny brackets in ∣ψ​⟩ mean that we’re talking of a quantum state rather than normal numbers. It’s of course more complicated than that but that’s all you need to know at this point.

α and β are numbers that define how likely you are to observe 0 or 1 if you ask, or observe the qubit. Physicists do use the term “observe” and would tell you it amounts to a collapse of the qubit's wave function, a process that turns the qubit from its quantum, superposition state to a more classical state of either 0 or 1.

“So α and β are probabilities?” Kinda, not exactly. They’re called amplitudes. They’re not probabilities in the classical sense of a real number in [0, 1] such that 0.5 means you have a 1/2 chance. They are complex numbers. Not “complex” as in difficult, but numbers of the form a + bi, where a and b are real numbers and i is the imaginary unit. The real numbers (denoted ℝ) are what you obtain if you always set b = 0. The special number i is not a real number, as it’s defined by

To obtain a classical probability from an amplitude α = a + bi, you just compute

Here |α| is called the modulus of α. There’s an exponent 2, so we say that we get the actual probability by taking the squared modulus of the amplitude.

For example, if

then the probability of observing 0 is:

Note that the value squared is 1/2, not i/2, because of the definition of the squared modulus above.

Oh and amplitudes can also be… negative real numbers, such as –0.85. But the squared modulus will turn a negative amplitude back to (positive) classical probabilities.

Two qubits

A pair of two qubits has four basis states: 00, 01, 10, and 11. We can write a two-qubit state as

You may wonder why we use the “+” sign here. We’re not saying the bit strings are ordinary numbers being added; this is vector addition notation for quantum states. But we won’t really need it in this post. So we’ll use the simpler, standard notation of a vertical list (in math terms, a column vector):

Since there are four possible values, there are four amplitudes. And since they describe the probability of observing each of the four states, the sum of their squared moduli must be equal to 1:

More qubits

Now you get the idea. With three qubits there are be eight possible states 000, 001, 010, …, 110, 111. And more generally with n qubits there are 2ⁿ basis states. Therefore a state of n qubits can be written as

Where again all probabilities must sum to 1, because… they’re probabilities:

And that’s as far and as abstract as we’ll get about qubits. Now let’s move to the actual computation.

Quantum gates

Like classical logical gates such as AND and OR, which transform Boolean values true and false, quantum gates transform quantum states. Since a quantum state is fully defined by its amplitudes, quantum gates can be seen as a transformation of amplitudes.

Here’s what makes quantum computing SO EASY in principle:

If you see the list of amplitudes as a list of numbers (a vector), then a quantum gate is just a matrix multiplied by this vector. In the exact same way as in high school linear algebra classes.

We’ll see concrete examples for one and two qubits.

Single-qubit gates

In classical logic, the gate NOT transforms 0 to 1 and 1 to 0. In quantum logic, the Pauli-X gate is the quantum equivalent of NOT:

We apply the Pauli-X gate to the qubit

by multiplying the matrix X by its column vector:

we obtain this result because the underlying operations are

If you’re not familiar with matrix-vector multiplication, it works like this: you multiply one by one the elements of the matrix’s first row with the elements of the vector, and do the same for the second row. Once you see this, you’ll realize that the simplest, and least exciting gate is

because it doesn’t change the amplitudes vector. The matrix/gate I is called the identity gate.

And that’s it. Transforming qubits is just matrix–vector multiplication.

The Pauli-X gate is not the most interesting one, but it is one of the simplest. Like amplitudes, the matrix of a quantum gate consists of complex numbers. Thus it may include negative numbers, numbers involving the unit i, etc. For example, the Pauli-Y gate is

This gate might look mysterious, but it turns out to have a simple interpretation if you see qubits from a geometrical perspective (for more, ask your favorite LLM about the Bloch sphere and how the Pauli-Y gate “rotates” qubits.)

Two-qubit gates

Remember that a 2-qubit state can be written

or

Like for single qubits, a 2-qubit quantum gate will be a matrix–vector multiplication. But this time the matrix will have four rows and four columns instead of 2×2.

You can directly use a 4×4 matrix, but you may see a 2-qubit transformation as an operation on the first qubit and another operation on the second qubit. Let’s say we want to apply the identity I to the first qubit, and the Pauli-X gate X to the second qubit. You can combine the two one-qubit gates to obtain a two-qubit gate using the operator “⊗”, a kind of multiplication called the tensor product:

The tensor product is easier to understand by looking at what it does than by reading a definition involving rows and columns:

If we apply I⊗X to our 2-qubit state we’ll obtain:

I skip the details of the matrix multiplication because that’s a lot of zeros and ones and alphas and additions and multiplications, but you can check it yourself by hand as an exercise.

Another really cool gate is the controlled-not (CNOT), defined as follows:

In terms of classical logic, CNOT does what it claims: it flips the second qubit when the first bit is 1. But in the more quantum context of entangled qubits it turns out to be more powerful.

Matrix properties & reversibility

You can’t use any matrix as a quantum gate, because you must always end up in a state whose probabilities add up to one—otherwise you’d be in a very strange world. The matrices that preserve this total probability for every input are called unitary matrices, and they have another cool property: they are reversible! This means you can always recover the input from the output. And this is why quantum computing is a form of reversible computing (save for the final observation/measurement, see below.)

Finding the output

I realize I haven’t even told you how to obtain the output of a quantum computation. It’s not the list of amplitudes. An actual quantum computer wouldn’t know the amplitudes, it would observe some of the qubits, yielding values according to the probability distribution defined by the implicit amplitudes. (An observation of a real QC gives only one outcome, and the state collapses accordingly. To estimate the probabilities [though not amplitudes], you’d have run the same circuit many times and build statistics from the observed bit strings.)

How to simulate this with our classical pen-and-paper linear-algebraic “computer”? You’ll need randomness to sample the observed values according to the distribution defined by the amplitudes, which you know.

What’s the catch?

Admittedly, our examples aren’t very impressive, not very quantum-looking yet; we haven’t even talked of the really cool stuff, like the concepts of phase and basis, interference, and entanglement—I’ve expressed quantum gates in terms of the familiar concepts of logic operations, but QC is waaaaay more than that. So why do we bother investing billions in building actually quantum quantum computers when they can be simulated by hand?

It's because an actual quantum computer does much less work, literally exponentially less work. It won’t explicitly compute the 1024 = 2¹⁰ amplitudes of a 10-qubit state. It will just evolve 10 physical qubits whose amplitudes are part of the physical state rather than entries in a list

Now imagine you’re working with 170 qubits (not a crazy number by today’s experimental standards). To simulate such a system classically you’d need to keep a list 2¹⁷⁰ amplitudes, and do even more additions and multiplications to run the circuit. But 2¹⁷⁰ is a lot. It’s more than the number of atoms on Earth. At that point, no amount of pens and paper will save you.

Posting this to share my slides. I feel it was hands down the best talk of my career, and the 60+ hours of preparation probably had something to do with it. The video recording should appear on YouTube in 2-4 weeks.

Let me also share a few photos:

Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming in the wake of the watertrucks and now when the drunk and the homeless have washed up in the lee of walls in alleys or abandoned lots and cats go forth highshouldered and lean in the grim perimeters about, now in these sootblacked brick or cobbled corridors where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors no soul shall walk save you. (Incipit of Suttree)

Welcome to Era 1:

• The Orchard Keeper (1965)

• Outer Dark (1968)

• Child of God (1973)

• Suttree (1979)

After the youth short stories and before moving from Knoxville to El Paso around 1975, Cormac McCarthy wrote four novels, concluding with the monumental and semi-autobiographical Suttree. Despite (or because) of his wealthy upbringing—his father was a successful lawyer—he lived during that period a rather destitute life in or around Knoxville. He spent time in North Carolina and New Orleans and did two trips to Europe funded by literary grants. He married in 1961 and fathered a son in 1962 but parted with this family and remarried in 1966. He took no actual job and lived off and for writing.

Era 1 novels aren’t comfort reads. Casual readers often discover McCarthy with his most accessible books No Country for Old Men or The Road, but there’s an argument for starting in Era 1; these stories are where McCarthy comes from, where his prose is the coldest and the most baroque, and where the aesthetic shock is greatest.

To those new to McCarthy and this era I’d recommend starting with Child of God, and that’s what most McCarthy readers will tell you, but better read my notes first and see which story calls to you.

The Orchard Keeper

This is McCarthy’s first novel, which he started in college. It’s the least read book of his era, partly because of its sheer difficulty, and arguably because of its outwardly non-memorable plot and characters. The Orchard Keeper centers on two figures: John Wesley Rattner, a boy coming of age, and Marion Sylder, a bootlegger who unknowingly killed Rattner’s father. Their paths will cross without either knowing who the other is.

ToC won William Faulkner Foundation Award (for first notable novel), but otherwise was not praised by critics. Here’s what a the NYT wrote in 1965:

In his ‘The Orchard Keeper’ he has his own story to tell; but he tells it with so many of Faulkner’s literary devices and mannerisms that he half submerges his own talents beneath a flood of imitation.

There are no marathon sentences in these pages, most of Faulkner's other famous characteristics are present: the wandering pronouns with no visible antecedents; the recondite vocabulary and coined words; the dense prose packed with elaborate figures of speech; (…)

And indeed ToC’s prose is often trying too hard, and lacks harmony and rhythm. McCarthy hadn’t yet learned how to let his text (and reader) breathe.

The critic concludes

All these factors insure that “The Orchard Keeper” is an exasperating book. But the wonder is that in spite of them it is also an impressive book.

acknowledging that

Mr. McCarthy is expert in generating an emotional climate, in suggesting instead of in stating, in creating a long succession of brief, dramatic scenes described with flashing visual impact.

I don’t want this note to sound too harsh though, or to give a wrong impression. ToC is not McCarthy’s at his greatest, but is a very fine novel in its own right, and a literary masterpiece when compared to most “bestsellers” produced by the book industry.

PS: While rereading part of it to write this post, a chapter turned out to be identical to the short story Bounty, discussed in our previous post.

PPS: As a cat owner, I appreciated this passage:

Outer Dark

McCarthy started writing Outer Dark in Knoxville, and finished it in Ibiza, of all places. It’s my favorite in this era after Suttree: Rinthy and Culla Holme are sister and brother in the Appalachian backwoods where they have an incestuous child. Culla abandons the infant in the woods but it’s saved by an itinerant wares salesman (the Tinker), unbeknownst to Culla, who intends to hand it to a wetnurse in town.

Outer Dark then follows the parallel tragicomedic journeys of Culla and his sister: his, fleeing out of guilt, seeking an occupation; hers, looking for her baby after she finds out Culla lied to her when he said the baby died. Through the towns, hamlets, and roads they pass they meet a variety of often pathetic characters, largely unnamed, including the three-headed band of men who eventually bring the search to the conclusion you’d expect from McCarthy. There are murders, desecrated graves, cannibalism, but also humour and grotesque. Like Rinthy’s recurrent “I’m a-huntin this here tinker”:

In Outer Dark, McCarthy dispenses with the overfaulknerism and opts for simpler parable-like prose that’s more fluid and lyrical than either The Orchard Keeper or Child of God. It suits the quietly oppressive and dangerous universe of the characters, and McCarthy's refusal to grant his protagonists any reflective distance from their own predicament.

Wikipedia innocently writes “Ethical considerations do not seem to exist in the world of Outer Dark, while the fates of characters are not determined by the morality of their lives.” Which is exactly what McCarthy is saying through his books if you remove “of Outer Dark” from that sentence.

Child of God

Like contemporary airport novels and Y.A. fiction, Child of God has short chapters, sometimes barely a page. But the analogy stops here:

Meet Lester Ballard. “He is small, unclean, unshaven. He moves in the dry chaff among the dust and slats of sunlight with a constrained truculence. Saxon and Celtic bloods. A child of God much like yourself perhaps.”

Child of God is McCarthy's most brutal book of this era (Blood Meridian would surpass it.) It tells the amoral, brutal, murderous, necrophiliac, but not humorless story of Lester from the time he’s evicted from his home in Sevier County, South-East of Knoxville up to his demise. In the penultimate chapter, McCarthy tells us that Ballard is not a “crazy man,” implying he’s beyond even that:

Commenters often cite Lester Ballard as a prefigure of Anton Chigurh, the villain of No Country for Old Men, for their shared gratuitous violence. But whereas Chigurh’s violence is calculated, methodical, and sadistic, Ballard’s is more primal and spontaneous. Still a neutral observer, McCarthy describes his atrocities with the same tone he uses for weather or plants.

I don’t know how I feel about CoG, to be honest. As much as I enjoyed the experience of reading it, I’ve only read it once, only going back to it to write this post. As scary as Ballard can be, he doesn’t have the depth of Chigurh, let alone that of Blood Meridian's Judge Holden. Perhaps it’s the sheer brutality not only of the story, but of the text itself that puts me off. Perhaps that was McCarthy’s goal. But perhaps I should read it again.

Suttree

McCarthy started Suttree around 1959 when he started writing fiction and it took him around twenty years to publish it. It’s unlike any of his other books: semi-autobiographical, strongly character-centered and plotless, with as many characters as a Dostoyevsky novel (many inspired from real characters, whose graves are listed here). The 1992 NYT article Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction correctly describes the central protagonist, Cornelius Suttree, as “a sensitive and mature protagonist, unlike any other in McCarthy’s work, who ekes out a living on a houseboat, fishing in the polluted city river, in defiance of his stern, successful father. A literary conceit—part Stephen Daedalus, part Prince Hal—he is also McCarthy, the willful outcast. Many of the brawlers and drunkards in the book are his former real-life companions.”

I wrote in the introduction that McCarthy walked away from his wife and newborn son. Cornelius Suttree did too, with grimmier consequences; this is page 148 of the 1992 Vintage reedition:

After this news Suttree takes a bus to the unnamed town where his ex lives and reminisces about the time he spent with his son:

These are some of the saddest lines McCarthy ever wrote.

What first strikes you when you open Suttree is the density and entropy of his prose. It can feel overwritten, mostly due to McCarthy’s love for arcane words. For example in the incipit's continuation:

Old stone walls unplumbed by weathers, lodged in their striae fossil bones, limestone scarabs rucked in the floor of this once inland sea. Thin dark trees through yon iron palings where the dead keep their own small metropolis. Curious marble architecture, stele and obelisk and cross and little rainworn stones where names grow dim with years. Earth packed with samples of the casketmaker’s trade, the dusty bones and rotted silk, the deathwear stained with carrion.

Readers may also be confused by the point of view shifts from the main third-person to characters’ first-person PoV, another faulknerism, like the speechmarkless dialogues.

Suttree doesn’t absorb you with its darkness or archetypal figures like Child of God or Blood Meridian. The brutality is less in actions than in the stories of the picaresque characters you’ll encounter in the book. It’s closest to his penultimate novel The Passenger; both center on a middle-aged man wandering in and around his hometown where he hangs out with old acquaintances. Like The Passenger’s Bobby Western, Cornelius Suttree is a self-aware, intellectual, compassionate, begrieved man who holds himself accountable for his past actions and shies away from any nostalgia or sentimentality. Suttree (the book) is slow, contemplative, and does what every McCarthy book does—"deal with issues of life and death," in his own words—better than any other of his books, save perhaps for The Road. Suttree marks the end of McCarthy’s Knoxville era. Even before its publication he’d moved to the Southwest, where he’d write western novels.

(I’ve read Suttree relatively late, it’s one of the last McCarthy novels that I read, and I probably wouldn’t have appreciated it as much had I not been familiar with his biography and other works. Whenever you read it, I recommend that afterwards you read these analyses by literary critics.)

Taylor Swift is the most successful pop songwriter and performer of her generation. She writes about romantic love and the tortuousness of relationships. The late Cormac McCarthy was the greatest American writer of his time. He wrote about death, violence, and evil as ambient conditions of existence. He also wrote about love and romance, though not in a way suitable to a song by Ms. Swift.

McCarthy grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee and his early books are inseparable from Tennessee’s geography and Appalachian vernacular, as Outer Dark’s dialogues reflect in phrases like “I’m a-huntin somebody” or “Mayhaps he never meant to.” At age 43 he moved to El Paso, Texas and later to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he passed in 2023.

At age 13 Swift moved to Hendersonville, Tennessee in Nashville suburbs, a place with little in common with Knoxville except for the state. She later moved to New York and keeps a home in Nashville.

But this post isn’t about Tennessee.

McCarthy and Swift both have distinctly delineated creative phases—eras, each with its own aesthetic, themes, locations, and emotional register. Swift’s eras are well documented but McCarthy's not as much. Having read all his novels and a large part of his other writings, I’ll give it a shot in this series of posts.

Era 0: Youth short stories

Period: 1959-1965

Books stories:

• Wake for Susan (1959)

• A Drowning Incident (1960)

• Bounty (1965)

• The Dark Waters (1965)

In 1959 McCarthy is 26 years old. He’d returned to the University of Tennessee in 1957 after serving four years in the U.S. Air Force. He published the 4-page stories Wake for Susan and A Drowning Incident in the student literary magazine The Phoenix under the name C. J. McCarthy (his full name is Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr.)

As in any writer’s first works there are self-indulgent phrases and probably too many adjectives and adverbs, but the early signs of his future novels’ themes, settings, and prose gravity are there.

Wake for Susan

Wake for Susan is quite unMcCarthyesque in its sentimentality but its opening bears an uncanny resemblance to one of the first scenes in No Country for Old Men (where Moss aims at and misses an antelope). And like in NCOM the protagonist is named in the first paragraph:

Now compare with NCOM’s incipit, 46 years later:

A Drowning Incident

He had no tears, only a great hollow feeling which even as he sat there gave way to a slow mounting sense of outrage.

A Drowning Incident revisits the cliché childhood lie (”They [the pups] had gone to a new home last week.”) The prose is again far from McCarthy’s more mature texts, with overwritten sentences (like “The spider fled her victim to the dark recesses of the musty shaft trailing a thin string of spittle which hung in mucous loops among the strands of the web”) and unfortunate adverbs (as in “turning weightlessly in the slow water. He watched uncomprehendingly“) that the mature McCarthy would have killed.

But many elements prefigure his future style and themes:

• The rural violence without moral or social commentary (Child of God is an obvious descendant.)

• The religion analogies (“as if performing some last rite.“)

• Describing things negatively, as what they are not (“a dimensionless wall”).

• A nameless character, like "the Kid” in Blood Meridian or the boy in The Road.

Bounty & The Dark Waters

He published these two stories five years after A Drowning Incident. It’s a clear jump in quality and maturity, particularly in TDW.

The Dark Waters

In TDW a boy (“the boy”) and a man (“the man,” which we discover is named Sylder after a third of the text) go night hunting with hounds in the Tennessee woods. The boy jumps in a creek to save a dog from drowning, they track a raccoon, and apart from that little happens. It reads like an exercise as the prelude to a longer story. And indeed the character Sylder appears in The Orchard Keeper, McCarthy's first novel published the same year as TDW.

This excerpt striked me as a combination of Suttree and The Road, for its semantic fields and pair of characters:

“Lady’s sharp trail-call still broke excitedly off to their right. They moved out under the dark trees, through a stand of young cedars gathered in a clearing, vespertine figures, rotund and druidical in their black solemnity. When the man reached the far side, the woods again, he stopped, and the boy caught up with him.”

TDW also introduces the speechmarkless, minimalist, colloquial dialogues interleaved with narration that confuse so many readers:

“The boy looked up at him. Cool enough, he said.

The clothes had begun to steam, looking like some esoteric game quartered and smoking on the spit.

Then he said, What’d you do with the coon?

Coon?

Yeah. The coon.

Goddamn, the boy said, I never saw the coon.”

Bounty

Again, Bounty has barely a plot: an unnamed boy (“the boy”) kills a hawk then goes to Knoxville's courthouse to collect the government bounty on it. He wanders the city's market with his dollar before going into a hardware store to buy a trap.

We notice again dialogues interleaved in narrative paragraphs, as in (and note the “Thisn’s”):

“The man took the signed paper and handed him the other one, the carbon. Thisn’s your copy, he told him. The boy took it and folded it, then took the dollar from his watchpocket and smoothed it on the counter. The man took the dollar and rang it up in the register. Wait till I get you a poke, he said.”

The following scene reminded me of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, its blind preacher, and the main protagonist Hazel Motes’ grotesque Church Without Christ:

“On the corner a man was screaming incoherently and brandishing a tattered Bible. Next him stood an old woman strapped into an accordion, mute and patient as a draft horse. He crossed the street behind the half-circle of spectators.”

Wise Blood was published in 1952 so I’d wager it’s no coincidence. O’Connor’s Southern gothic, Faulknerian style could have been an influence, but we have no evidence he read it.

But the best part of Bounty is its opening paragraph, which I’ll let you read.

I’ll write about the next eras in the next posts. By the time his first novel appeared in 1965 (The Orchard Keeper), Charles McCarthy had become Cormac.

Era 1: The Southern Gothic years

• The Orchard Keeper

• Outer Dark

• Child of God

• Suttree

Era 2: Blood Meridian

Era 3: The Border Trilogy

• All the Pretty Horses

• The Crossing

• Cities of the Plain

Era 4: No Country for Old Men and The Road

Era 5: The Passenger & Stella Maris

Every. Fucking. Week I hear this kind of nonsense, online or in meetings. Each time it takes a small but measurable toll on my soul. Even otherwise respectable researchers or experts from other fields make mistakes that any LLM would’ve corrected.

So once again, as clearly as I can:

QUANTUM COMPUTERS ARE NOT FASTER COMPUTERS. They don’t run your code quicker. They don’t have a higher clock speed. Speed, in the conventional sense of velocity, is irrelevant to what they do.

QUANTUM COMPUTERS DO NOT TRY ALL ANSWERS SIMULTANEOUSLY. It's the most seductive yet wrong intuition. Superposition isnt parallelism. You can’t just “read off” all answers and pick the “best,” for measurement collapses the state.

QUANTUM COMPUTERS COULD ONLY SOLVE VERY FEW MATH PROBLEMS. Only integer factoring (as in RSA), discrete logarithms (as in elliptic curve cryptography), and a bunch of others could benefit from exponential superpolynomial speedup. Most problems you care about arent on that list.

QUANTUM COMPUTERS DO NOT SOLVE THOSE PROBLEMS BY BRUTE-FORCING FASTER. Quantum computers couldnt outrun classical ones by sheer velocity. Speedup, when it exists, comes from exploiting quantum interference and superposition, not from going harder.

QUANTUM COMPUTERS CANNOT BREAK AES AND OTHER SYMMETRIC CIPHERS. Data is encrypted (at-rest, in-transit) with symmetric ciphers, like the AES standard. Grover’s algorithm gives a quadratic speedup, but it doesnt mean AES-128 becomes AES-64. In any case, full 256-bit keys guarantee quantum-proofness.

TODAY’S QUANTUM COMPUTERS ARE USELESS. Don’t believe those press releases and marketing brochures. Current quantum computer prototypes are so tiny that they’re far from doing anything more efficient than classical computers.

BLAKE3 is not a NIST standard. It's not even an IETF (RFC) standard. But from an engineering perspective it’s the best choice for many use cases, because it’s ridiculously fast.

In this note we’ll review some of the use cases that BLAKE3 addressed, focusing on the most prominent projects:

The LLVM compiler infrastructure adopted BLAKE3 to replace SHA-1 and address SHA-1's collision vulnerability. BLAKE3 also proved faster than SHA-1.

Cargo, Rust's package manager, uses BLAKE3 for checksums. This means every Rust developer on the planet is running it continuously without thinking about it.

Bazel, Google's widely adopted build system, supports BLAKE3 as its file digest function.

CCache, the popular compiler cache, migrated from MD4 (!) to BLAKE3 in 2020, shortly after we announced BLAKE3.

Cloudflare Pages uses BLAKE3 for hashing requests’ content, and Cloudflare Pipelines supports BLAKE3, along with other hashes .

The OpenZFS filesystem supports BLAKE3 for computing checksums of filesystem blocks.

The iroh networking stack (used for distributed AI training, P2P messaging, video streaming, etc.) chose BLAKE3 for fast hashing of small data blobs, although BLAKE3 is mainly known for its performance on large data. The iroh project created the Rust crate iroh_blake3.

In the blockchain space, many projects use BLAKE3 internally, but let’s just mention:

• Alephium, whose proof-of-work system consists only of BLAKE3 hashing, and for which dedicated hardware miners (and thus BLAKE3 hardware circuits) were created.

• Ethereum’s EIP-7864 (Ethereum state using a unified binary tree) uses BLAKE3 for tree hashing, but notes “Do not assume BLAKE3 is a final decision.”

• Chia uses BLAKE3 as part of its proof-of-space system.

• IPFS added support for BLAKE3, as IPFS does a lot of hashing to ensure file integrity.

• Solana uses BLAKE3 as the hash in its runtime software. Some questioned its efficiency on short messages, but it doesn’t seem to be a meaningful issue.

BLAKE3 can speed up post-quantum cryptography: the PQC-Suite-B project (which I contributed to) used BLAKE3 to create a variant of the post-quantum signature standard ML-DSA, replacing SHA-3 with BLAKE3: ML-DSA-B.

In video game applications, BLAKE3 was adopted by the Mesa 3D graphics library (for faster Vulkan shader hashing), and the fighting game Tekken 8 reported using BLAKE3 in its credits.

The research project presented in the recent paper Do Androids Dream of a Dead Internet: Interactive Watermarks for Bot Detection used BLAKE3 as a universal hash function. As a general-purpose cryptographic hash, BLAKE3 is overqualified for the job, but fast enough and likely close to the speed of pure universal hashes.

More anecdotally, BLAKE3 appears to be used in a whistleblowing portal of the Indonesian Civil Service Police Unit.

Many other systems use BLAKE3, including ClickHouse, Farcaster, Nix, Nym, Redox, Wasmer. Many proprietary commercial systems likely use it too but examples are harder to find.

Gómez Dávila was Colombian and lived most of his life in Bogotá. But he first lived in Paris, where he attended a school of the Benedictine order, and after suffering from a lung disease was tutored privately. He never attended university and returned to Colombia at 23, where he spent the rest of his life surrounded by books. This is one of the rare photos from his youth:

He never wrote fiction, and barely any prose at all. He wrote aphorisms, thick collections of them. Here are some excerpts translated in English (you’ll find many more in his Escolios Escogidos [“free” PDF], an edition sorting his escolios by theme):

This isn’t poetry but it bears its qualities: minimalism, elegance, distilling the erudition of literature and history in incisive fragments; “utmost compression and rejection of system-building,” says that book’s prologue.

Interestingly, Gómez Dávila is better known in Europe than in Colombia and the Americas. His Wikipedia biographies in Spanish and English are largely incomplete, the German one being the most detailed. So I didn’t expect him to be as celebrated as García Márquez in his hometown, but still expected a little recognition.

I found nothing. None of his books in the dozens of bookshops I visited in Colombia. None of the bookshop owners had heard about him, even that former philosophy student I met in Medellín who knew various obscure philosophers. Shelves of García Márquez works, but not a page of Gómez Dávila. Needless to say, no street named after him.

Nothing, until I visited a large public library in Bogotá, where I finally found his books after passing two security checkpoints and asking three employees:

This shelf includes all his collections of escolios in various editions, though not his complete writings (it misses the Notas and Textos I):

• Escolios a un texto implícito (2 volumes, 1977)

• Nuevos escolios a un texto implícito (2 volumes, 1986)

• Sucesivos escolios a un texto implícito (1992)

In that library, I also discovered this bilingual volume from which I took the excerpts above:

It includes an introductory essay I’d never read, by the German historian Till Kinzel:

I photographed this prologue’s pages and OCR’d them into this PDF (I’m sure M. Kinzel won’t mind.)

That’s not the only place in Bogotá where you’ll find his books. You can literally browse books from his personal library (and some of his manuscripts) at the Biblioteca Luis Angél Arango. But you need to make an appointment in advance and justify your visit as a researcher. Alas, I found out too late. Next time.

I might publish another post with explanations about the story and its symbolism. Or not.

Tractate 10: Lights

07:24 – …

א

Seconds after the impact something outside slammed the ground and our car shifted downhill. A high and abrasive alarm went out. Kagami lay unconscious on the floor. He had a content face. Shesh and Seraphina hovered by the mattress.

He’s breathing, I said. He got knocked down. Should wake soon.

Thank you, Seraphina said. She was catching her breath. Her stare held gratefulness and also fear.

I turned to the window.

Jesus, I let out.

The carriages formed three sides of an incomplete square. The emerald flank of another car faced us in the distance, parallel to ours. The car between the two had collapsed on its side. All I saw was its dark underframe. Windowpanes slid out from above and people emerged and periscoped like meerkats. They found a desolate terrain of grass and mud where broken poles and catenary lines lay like the abandoned toys of an irate deity.

Let’s get out, Seraphina said. She grabbed the violin case.

Shesh watched Kagami as if trying to solve a riddle.

This is not the final destination, he said, mostly to himself.

The alarm stopped and white noise replaced it. Then Czerny’s voice, uncannily calm.

Valued passengers, we have arrived where we shouldn’t. Please remain calm and vacate the premises immediately.

What happened?

It was Kagami. He looked calm, unbothered. Shesh and Seraphina explained what happened and helped him stand up and showed him the wreckage outside. He didn’t react.

I’ve been dreaming, he said after a moment. Of this.

What did you see? Shesh asked.

The rail track stopped. The train didn’t slow down in time.

A prophecy, Shesh said.

Are you all right? Kagami asked us.

We’re fine, I said.

I opened the compartment door. Water flowed downhill and the fish from the aquarium with it. Crabs explored corners of the corridor. Through the window on my right was the overhang of a cliff. The front of our car stood close to the edge and its white stratus. The car perpendicular to us was closer still. Far away across the ravine, the jagged silhouette of a rocky massif like flatten Dolomites standing witness.

I stepped back into the compartment and told them what I saw. I climbed a mattress and the tray table and found a box attached to the bulkhead by the window. I opened the transparent plastic clip and lifted the emergency hammer out. I aimed its tungsten tip at the left corner. The windowglass spiderwebed. We pushed it together until it detached from its frame and fell away. I cleared the remaining glass from the bottom edge and helped Shesh step out. He dropped down on the mud where he almost fell, his one hand braced against the frame and his handless arm carrying a black fabric bag. Kagami and Seraphina followed through and I went last.

ב

We stood by our car next to a patch of soiled snow.

Low clouds and morning mist mixed with smoke from some unidentified place. Sunrays pierced through grudgingly. The emerald cars and the dark green of the pine needles colored the grey scene. Birds called from the trees but we didn’t see them.

Passengers coalesced in the middle of the square, assisted by staff in blue uniforms. No sign of Czerny. The elderly couple from our car strolled along the collapsed car, smiling, stopping to take pictures with a film camera the man held around his neck. I turned and saw their compartment window untouched.

Kagami was still groggy. We moved on closer to the forest edge on the other side of the railtrack, at a distance from the precipice. Kagami sat on a dead tree trunk. Shesh sat next to him and conjured a water bottle he offered him.

More passengers spilled from the carriages.

Could have been much worse, I said. What you’d call a miracle, rabbi?

We shouldn’t count on miracles for our survival, my friends. The kudz spoke to us, warned us. I’m happy we’re alive. And if we died, we wouldn’t be here discussing it.

Never heard a rabbi bring up an anthropic argument, Seraphina added. As far as I’m concerned it’s all happenstance. Where are we anyway?

She was looking at Kagami who was checking his phone.

If the GPS is right, we are just twenty-six kilometers from the terminus, he said without looking up.

Shesh’s smile widened. He looked at the sky as if contemplating stars in a cloudless night.

Almost there, he said.

He bent to fetch the fabric bag and handed it to Kagami.

I won’t need this anymore. Please have it.

Kagami accepted the gift and picked the kudz from inside. He didn’t know what to say. He said thank you with a polite nod.

I’m going to walk, Shesh said. I’ll arrive before you. Maybe I’ll meet new friends along the way.

Don’t, I said. You’d walk the whole day in the cold.

Walking will warm me up. I’ll see you all soon. Take care of yourselves my friends.

And he left towards the head of the train. We watched him grow smaller against the wreckage and the mist. He didn’t look back.

Kagami sat in silence. I asked if he was all right. He said he just needed rest and his head didn’t hurt anymore. He pulled the photo from his pocket and smiled at it. Seraphina brought him a blue blanket and wrapped him in it. I didn’t know where she got it.

Kagami held the kudz in both hands and stared at it.

Everything all right? I asked.

He looked up as if waking.

Yes. I was thinking. About the train. About this object.

The rabbi’s box, I said.

I will keep it with me. Bring it to Japan. Shesh is a good man.

ג

Miles, look.

Her hand rose toward the trees. A blackbird lifted from a low branch and vanished into the canopy. Below where it had been, an aperture opened between two giant pines.

She left her violin case with Kagami and walked toward a narrow path into the forest.

Her anthracite shell jacket and black pants disappeared in the shade. I followed her.

The path was of brown pine needles and zigzagged between trunks that rose branchless like wooden columns. Ten meters in, the path widened and straightened. Under the sparser needles layer, square cobblestones emerged.

When she heard me catching up she slowed.

You didn’t want to follow him? she asked.

The rabbi?

Yeah.

I’m not that adventuresome. And it’s objectively not the right thing to do. But you knew he wouldn’t listen.

I don’t think he was much concerned with what’s right. She glanced at me.

What do you mean? I asked, glancing back.

Defining right and wrong takes so much trouble. All the risk-reward calculations. Discomfort and unpredictability scare us but that’s how you learn. The journey matters. Even more so when it’s on your own terms. She paused. I know how that sounds.

The way rabbis tend to comment on religious matters, I said. Seeking the right line of argument, conclusions as a by-product.

More clichés. But maybe. I don’t know, I’m not a rabbi. She kept walking.

The forest was now sparser and with different trees. Not only pines but also birches and bare oaks. Beyond their crowns the sky lightened. Shy sunlight broke through and lit remnants of snow that sparkled like abandoned crystals.

We strolled slowly and stopped when we heard sounds. She said she’d seen an owl fly from a branch but I’d missed it.

She stopped and knelt.

Look, she said.

She stood up and handed me what she’d picked. A white feather.

That’s fitting, I said.

Yeah, angels watching.

Or your owl.

It wasn’t white. I saw it.

Must be an angel then.

Do you believe in angels, Miles?

Come on.

What?

You sound like a lawyer. Asking a question only if you know the answer.

Right? I was interested in what you’d say.

And?

You said exactly what I expected. She smiled.

I got got, I said, and I pocketed the feather.

ד

We’d been in the forest for almost half an hour. Now the path was just bare earth going downhill to a small rift where no tree had grown. It was an expanse of torn ground as if moved by machines decades ago, a mix of forest soil and limestone covered by a thin skiff of snow.

Beyond the treeless zone the ground fell away into darkness. Tree crowns rose from below and between them something green and curved that wasn’t a tree.

Let’s see what’s over there, then we’ll go back, she said.

Fine by me, the train won’t leave without us, I said.

The path got steeper and slippery. We held branches to keep our balance. I slipped on a flat rock and almost fell.

When we reached the flatter area the path vanished and we stepped in the snow. There was no other human footsteps but there were animals’ steps. It was quiet and windless. We paused.

Beautiful, isn’t it? she asked.

It is. Let’s see what’s over there? she ignored that and stood still.

This place reminds me of something, she said.

Of what?

I was ten, a hike with my dad in New Mexico. It was drier, obviously, but the colors were the same.

Rio Grande? I asked.

Maybe, I don’t remember. But I saw a snake and I wasn’t scared. He was proud.

Were you living in New Mexico then?

Yeah, a couple of years. Then we moved out again. My dad’s work.

What’d he do?

He was a scientist. Nuclear physics.

Like Kagami.

Not exactly the same field. But not that far, now that you mention it. It ended up driving him crazy, literally.

Kagami seems quite sane to me, as far as scientists are concerned.

Fair, but his mission is insane. He’s an idealist, unlike my dad. He thinks if there’s one chance in a million it’s still better than none.

You don’t believe that.

It’s not about belief, it’s about statistics. I only believe in the law of unintended consequences.

I thought you hated statistics.

Which is a way to acknowledge it. You don’t hate something unimportant. Nobody’ll tell you they hate the number 98 or trees’ branches. And I don’t even hate it, for that matter. It’s just less worthy of my time than other things.

Guess you could say the same about people. It’s not the people themselves you resent but the time wasted with some of them.

Not sure of that. It’s not mutually exclusive. Wiktor Czerny is an interesting case study. Like a serial killer is. But I’d rather hang out with you or Shesh.

I’ll take that, I said.

I walked to the edge. The green structure was a half-sphere blanketed with moss atop a cubic stone edifice the size of a cabin. At each corner stood pyramidal stone spikes point upward and bare of dust or stains. The wall beneath was ochre and stained by moisture and lichen. Stairs descended on both sides to what I guessed was an entrance.

Seraphina joined me.

What is that? she asked.

A temple?

Let’s find out, she said.

I took the left stair and she the right. The stone steps were eroded and of uneven height. We met at the center before a narrow iron-barred door. She found the handle and pulled and the door opened without a sound.

Inside, a flat ceiling and walls painted white save for the lower third tiled in pale turquoise squares depicting flowers, plants, animals. Pale stone benches flanked each wall.

Across from us, a niche framed by a roman arch was empty.

In the center of the room, candles burned in a shallow pit. Five thin white candles with twisted shafts, their flames steady in the still air. Unlit candles waited in a small wooden bucket beside the pit.

We stood in silence.

Miles, she said.

She knelt and chose a candle from the bucket and lit it from one of the burning flames. She planted it among the others and looked at me.

I knelt and took a candle. The wax was cold on my fingers. I held it to the fire until it caught and placed it with the rest. Seven flames.

I stood first. She raised a hand toward me but then withdrew it and rose on her own. She smiled faintly.

We should come back here someday, she said.

Trusting means “having reasonable confidence that an actor will keep their promise to behave according to prescribed rules and not violate whatever moral covenant is implicitly in place.” I write moral covenant rather than contract or law because those don’t necessarily apply; we’re in a decentralized, transnational, often effectively lawless environment. The question then becomes: what prevents actors from betraying trust? It often boils down to financial or reputational incentives, where the latter typically correlates closely with the former.

A notion closely associated to trust is that of a single point of failure. We’ll see how they relate:

Some counter the trustlessness claim by arguing that there’s always something these inds/orgs have in common: the very protocol they’re working with, often the same implementation thereof. (Example: Bitcoin nodes predominantly run Bitcoin Core; counterexample: Ethereum’s beacon chain has meaningful client diversity.) You must then assume that the protocol fulfills its functional duties and achieves its security goals. But saying you “trust” the protocol represents a semantically different type of trust: the protocol cannot of its own volition betray you or act in its selfish interest, for it has no agency. Thus, here “trust” is only metaphorical, approximative, and at best indirect.

Consequently, a trustless system can have single points of failure.

You can argue that you’re implicitly trusting the protocol’s developers, which isn’t an unfair objection. But since the protocol is generally public, its implementation open-source, and at least some users self-compile binaries from source, it’s considerably harder for developers to unilaterally and directly harm you for profit (as opposed to a stablecoin operator, bridge operator, oracle service, or memecoin issuer you’ve invested in). I therefore posit that this reduced level of trust is generally acceptable, as it sits—with important caveats—in the same category as trusting your OS, runtime, hardware, and landlord: if you’re not a high-value target (a “whale,” celebrity, or cartel boss), your risk exposure here is much lower.

Even regardless of SPoFs, being trustless (in the above sense, where no single agent is trusted and those semi-collectively trusted have limited capacity for harm) doesn’t imply security, as blockchains daily demonstrate:

1. Even with virtuous actors’ systems fail: Even if designers, developers, and operators are wholly virtuous and benevolent (ignoring for a moment that they generally can’t be held accountable) their systems routinely fail to achieve their functional and security goals. This stems from the combination of technical complexity, limited QA and security maturity, and overconfidence in the underlying trust assumptions.

2. Adversaries exist and are rational: Not everyone in the world prioritizes the interests of a blockchain protocol and its users (and why would they?). The parties we capture under the umbrella term “attackers” are, by definition and essence, untrustworthy. They will exploit any avenue to profit from the protocol in ways unforeseen by and undesirable to its users.

Lastly, trustlessness isn’t binary. Blockchainers routinely debate which chains are the “most decentralized,” and rightfully so. Consider for example the Base L2, which still operates a single sequencer (run by Coinbase). This makes it highly centralized, notwithstanding the Ethereum decentralization of Base’s settlement layer. Base users must (even if they’re unaware of it) trust Coinbase, an actor with agency and incentives.

Even the most trustless, decentralized blockchain introduces trust when you use it: when checking a transaction or querying an address balance, you’re typically hitting one interface: Etherscan, an Infura RPC endpoint, a specific node. That interface is both a single point of failure (if it goes down or gets compromised, you can’t access the chain) and an agent you must trust (it can lie about balances, censor transactions, or feed you stale data). The protocol may be trustless, but your access point isn’t: there’s a trustless consensus layer but a trusted access layer.

(This post may seem obvious to security folks but it's often misunderstood in public/online discourse about blockchains, where “decentralized," "trustless," and "secure" are often conflated.)

Feature image/song: Future, We Don't Trust You.

– So tell me, what’s this quantum thing about?
– You mean quantum computing?
– That scary thing in the news.
– Quantum computing.
– So explain it to me.

I then remained silent for thirty seconds, as I always do when someone non-technical asks me this. I looked for an angle that wouldn’t insult her intelligence or distort reality, and without the lazy analogies you hear on YouTube.

My friend is brilliant, but knows nothing of quantum physics or algebra. Instead of jumping into technicalities, I found that what works well is saying what QC is not, starting from the familiar misconceptions. But before that, I must clarify the meaning of “quantum” and “computing.”

Trigger warning: To physicists and quantum engineers: there may be wince-worthy simplifications. If you catch anything blatantly wrong or misleading, call me out and I’ll fix it.

Disclaimer: Not all lawyers are clueless about quantum computing. Another lawyer friend, after seeing a draft of this post, suggested I start with: “The first thing it’s not is ‘in existence.’” I happily complied.

Quantum

In quantum computing, “quantum” refers to quantum mechanics a.k.a. quantum physics, which explains how small particles behave: photons, electrons, and so on. The rules down there are nothing like those that govern planets, rocks, and basketballs; gravity matters very little, for example. Instead, weird and counterintuitive rules apply, like:

• Particle–wave duality: A quantum object behaves both like a particle and a wave, depending on how you look at it. As a particle, it shows up at a specific place; as a wave, its position is not pre-determined but described by probabilities. And waves can add up or cancel out, like sound waves in your noise-cancelling earphones—that’s interference.

• Entanglement: A quantum state can involve several particles, for example multiple ions. Observing one particle can tell you what you’ll find when observing the others, even if they are light-years apart.

• Randomness: Colloquially, we call events random when they’re hard to predict, even though they follow deterministic (that is, non-random) laws, like a coin toss does. Quantum mechanics involves genuine, non-deterministic randomness.

Terminology footnote

Physicists borrowed the word “quantum” from Latin, plural “quanta,” to mean a discrete amount of energy, time, matter, or other physical concept. In physics, a quantum is the smallest relevant unit within a given theory. A common misunderstanding is that quanta are necessarily indivisible*, whereas they’re not always:

• Photons are (essentially) indivisible energy quanta in the context of electromagnetic fields. However,

• The nucleus of an atom can be treated as a quantum in the context of nuclear physics, even though it’s made of smaller parts: protons and neutrons, themselves made of quarks (indivisible).

*A particle is indivisible if it’s not [known to be] made of other parts. The known-to-be, generally accepted understanding is called the Standard Model of Particle Physics, or just the Standard Model.

Computing

Computing is the business of turning the input of a program into its output. In today’s computers, input and output are bits (ones and zeros), but in principle they can be described in many other ways, like bigger numbers or other symbols, or dog barking.

A program describes the operations the computer applies to the input. It’s usually in a human-readable language like the Python or Rust programming languages, which another program—an interpreter or a compiler—translates into computer-level operations: arithmetic operations (addition, multiplication, etc.), logical operations (AND, OR, etc.), or memory manipulation (data copy, erasure, etc.).

Quantum computing (theory)

Physicists came up with quantum computing because they were stuck: classical computers weren’t powerful enough to simulate the behavior of small particles in order to test physics theories. Instead of simulating Nature’s fabric with electronic computers, they figured they could work with the real stuff they want to simulate, directly obeying the very laws they’d have to simulate with transistors.

QC was first imagined by Richard Feynman in the papers Simulating physics with computers (1982) and Quantum mechanical computers (1985). Rather than manipulating bits with electronic circuits and transistors like classical computers do, QC manipulates quantum states. This means that

• Input and output are encoded as quantum states—remember, the things made of quantum objects, which behave “randomly” and interfere with each other because they’re kind of waves even if they’re called particles.

• Programs transform quantum states, rather than bits or numbers. These operations are totally different from your CPU’s addition or multiplication: simplifying really a lot, quantum operations—quantum gates—change the probabilities** underlying quantum states; they change the level of uncertainty, they may turn uncertainty into certainty, or the other way. If you wonder what this has to do with computing, worry not.

On paper, a quantum computing program looks like a circuit: objects connected by wires to quantum gates until a final state from which you observe the output, not unlike an electronic circuit:

(Image courtesy of IBM.)

**A quantum state’s probabilities aren't the ones you’re used to, like a 50% chance, and generally a decimal number between zero and one. Quantum probabilities are called amplitudes, and are complex numbers (of the form a+bi, where i is the imaginary unit), and can be negative.

Quantum computers (practice)

As previously stated, (useful) quantum computers do not exist yet.

Building and running a quantum computer is way harder than building a microprocessor like the one in your phone. You’re not doing electronics, you’re doing physics. You don’t deal with bits represented as transistors (electronic components) but with quantum bits (qubits) materialized by literally the smallest particles in the Universe. Because they’re minuscule and brittle,

1. Qubits are extremely hard to create, set in the state you want, manipulate, and get to interact with each other. I won’t elaborate on what “hard” entails, but as you imagine it’s about challenges in terms of science, engineering, logistics, equipment, lab environment, raw material, etc.

2. Qubits are highly sensitive to their environment: heat, electromagnetic fields, acoustic vibrations, and so on. You need to reduce the temperature to close the the minimal possible (zero Kelvin) and implement quantum error-correction techniques to keep the system stable and error-tolerant.

Several companies*** try to build quantum computers, but after decades of research and billions invested there are only tiny prototypes that—despite what the websites and marketing material and press releases say—are of no practical use whatsoever.

Let me emphasize: None of the current quantum computers prototypes by IBM, Google, or any other company is superior to a modern classical computer, for any reasonable definition of “superior.”

Now tet me do an admittedly unfair and misleading, but not entirely pointless comparison:

• A modern laptop can often store a terabyte of data (around 8000 billions of bits) and has a working memory of dozens of gigabytes (billions of bits). Its microprocessor can run computations lasting days, weeks, and more long as it’s kept powered.

• Today’s best quantum computer prototypes are limited with respect to:

  • Qubits number: Around a thousand qubits, of which only a handful can serve to actually compute, because of the…

  • Error rate: The higher, the more qubits you need to correct errors, with quantum error-correcting codes.

  • Coherence time: Quantum computers remain stable (and thus usable) only for a time ranging from microseconds to seconds.

Different QC technologies make different trade-offs between those three dimensions, but none currently comes close to satisfying all three.

***None of today’s quantum-computing companies are profitable. When they have revenue at all, it mostly comes from research funding and partnership grants (SPAC-listed QC companies have public quarterly reports.) And don’t be fooled by D-Wave, the self-proclaimed “world’s leading quantum computing company:” what they build isn’t a quantum computer in the standard, gate-based sense, but a machine that happens to involve certain quantum-mechanical effects. D-Wave’s systems are inherently incapable of the kind of quantum speed-ups that I discuss later.

What QC is not

The word “quantum” sounds cool and scientific and mysterious, which is precisely why it’s overused in pop culture and advertizing to suggest some science-backed miraculous technology, from dishwasher tablets to cosmetics. Because quantum computing is actually quantum and poorly understood, it’s a bonanza for hyperbolic and grotesque claims. Even otherwise respectable companies lower themselves to clickbaity statements, amplified and distorted by the content generation industry: Google*** alluded that its QC research results supported the many-worlds interpretation (a.k.a. “multiverse”) of quantum mechanics, while Microsoft claimed to have created a “new type of matter.”

More subtle—and arguably more irritating, and dangerous—are the falsehoods that aren’t outright nonsense. These are the intellectually tempting, audience-pleasing distortions plaguing news sites and YouTube videos, often spread in good faith by experts from adjacent fields. Let me highlight the most common ones.

****Google’s QC unit is branded “Quantum AI,” even though AI is largely orthogonal to QC and they don’t do more “AI” than other QC companies. QCs could run AI models and in theory speed up some subroutines, but the same can be said of spreadsheet macros and search-engines algorithms. (To be fair, some companies go further and claim they do quantum AI when they do neither.)

Myth 1: Free parallel computing

A quantum bit can be seen as (oversimplification warning) being “1 and 0 simultaneously,” in the sense that observing it yields 0 or 1 according to some (quantum) probability parameters. This at-the-same-time-ish state is called superposition.

Wait, if a qubit can be in many states at once, why not create a state that represents all possible solutions to a problem and run the computation once to let the quantum computer find the one that works? We could try all passwords simultaneously and select the correct one at the end!

It doesn’t work that way. Not even close.

This misconception is so common that Scott Aaronson (among the greatest QC researchers and bloggers) added it to his blog’s banner:

Myth 2: Ultra-fast computers

A QC’s power (we’ll get to it) has nothing to do with speed in the usual sense of velocity. QCs are not classical computers doing the same operations orders of magnitude faster. In fact, if you count raw operations per second, a quantum computer would almost certainly be slower than a classical one.

Myth 3: “Cracking” all cryptography

A corollary of Myth 1: Many cryptographic systems rely on a secret key. Take data encryption, as used to encrypt a database: anyone who knows the key (and has access to the encrypted data) can decrypt it and recover clear text data. Could a quantum computer “crack” such encryption by trying all possible keys at once? No. QC can’t improve on bruteforce, save for a mostly theoretical speed-up.

However, there’s another class of cryptography that quantum computers could break:

Why all the fuss about QC then?

At last, let’s address my friend’s concern:

Why does QC matter for cybersecurity?

Why has U.S. Federal agency NIST standardized a new type of public-key cryptography that is “post-quantum”? And why has it retired the RSA and elliptic curve-based cryptosystems?

Why are cryptocurrency users worried? (And why quantum computers will not steal your bitcoins, even if they can?)

Quantum speed-up

By exploiting superposition, interference, and entanglement, quantum computers could solve certain mathematical problems far faster than any known classical computer; again, not by running the same instructions faster, but by doing (quantum) things that non-quantum computers can’t do.

This is called quantum speed-up. And in some very specific cases, problems that would take classical computers millions of years could, in principle, be solved in days or hours on a sufficiently large QC.

(For a list of quantum algorithms offering quantum speed-ups, check the Quantum zoo.)

Unmultiplying numbers

Most encrypted communications, from WhatsApp discussions to the HTTPS connection to this blog, use public-key cryptography, whose security relies on the difficulty of deceptively simple math problems. One such problem is factorization, or “unmultiplication”: any computer can easily multiply numbers, even very large ones. But they can’t do the reverse operation:

For example, my computer can multiply

40160895852844009921030582458177023751149608603560122736811850395290758101622602227312993008663060573128309806075822160041568801528700271189810757373385118277329108717034617301346931111565786388668586110756276252344613018958475585818678689475264694034888916262136204857616135787294991955010950534715362928961

with

167490607764457115789922096379820718444546728581554589725893099248994268739022303883547106856890629039527872559871857553049463569835676624582299213536348554005121105980941986448170586253727274865993644246974524181147667338383488542450160330541384660724752104687618042059153685486425499029405656789170161284103

and obtain

6726572854757908509192009735316226908350181862868328529931455243588748157623532254497231332747122156614053064156389626106224601390887852274333723141725274232300258425373923736794992336313639711325862458921610845776982386791554679218228917337362619041703342861211862884349013870563321829893198881132168561777205652311559741549923492808959528563944472756679353515749423685198959573829938226017454631095212636707498919070513249730513598379520705705891364183849743691218116470125737479401662245891972047284236561716637900527887566791393045934340156835783212647076267119945090108260675835377686382014735001822686927606983

Given this number, however, no computer can recover its two factors. But a quantum computer could, using Shor’s quantum algorithm. And this would literally break most internet communications.

When?

In theory, given enough time, research, engineering effort, and funding, it should be possible to build a quantum computer that’s large and reliable enough to run Shor’s algorithm and break the public-key cryptography used in practice. We simply don’t know when or even whether this will ever happen.

Many quantum computing companies will tell you “five to ten years.” I don’t expect to see such a machine in my lifetime (though I’d be happy to be proven wrong.) I’m not dismissing the risk, just weighing the evidence the way a lawyer would.

Featured image: Better Call Saul.

Compliance is like democracy: it’s not designed to get you the best, just to avoid the absolute worst. And most days, that works.

Best analogy I’ve got: vehicle inspection. An inspection won’t turn a bad driver into a good one. It just makes sure the brakes will work before you wreck someone. Same with infosec: compliance won’t make your organization magically secure but it makes reckless driving less lethal, for you and everyone else.

Can’t believe I find myself half-defending compliance when every week I wrestle with its absurd requirements, its checkbox-addicted practitioners, and its asinine bureaucracy.

Take ISO27001, which is to organizations what CISSP is to individuals: broad and shallow, and mocked for exactly that reason. Fair enough. But let’s be honest about what it does and doesn’t do. ISO27001 auditors aren’t there to decide whether your ISMS fits your business or reduces risk to an acceptable level. That’s your job. Theirs is narrower: check that your ISMS is structured the way ISO expects it and that it covers the ISO domains and that your policies aren’t completely bonkers.

But you’re still the driver. You’re perfectly free to take that shiny ISMS and steer it into a ravine. Add in the usual caveats—lazy auditors, scope gymnastics, cosplay security staff, fan-fiction policies—and yes, you get the illusion of security, which your board and clients will likely happily buy.

(And yeah, that part does suck, the willful ignorance of the risk and incompetence once you “comply.” And it’s pretty much the same in every industry, from banking to the healthcare and agri-food industries.)

So no, don’t worship compliance. But don’t dismiss it because it doesn’t do what it can’t. What I tell my team is never do a control just for compliance. Do it because it reduces risk or friction or whatever. If it also makes an auditor happy as a byproduct, great. (That being said, I’m not gonna lie: sometimes we do things just for compliance, and I hate it.)

Have you ever tried to schedule a meeting with more than a handful of people? You start with good intentions: find a slot that works for everyone, respect time zones, keep it within working hours. Minutes later you’re staring at a calendar that looks like a losing game of Tetris. You try another day, then another week, and ten minutes later you finally send the invite—only to learn shortly after that not everybody will join, because their calendar wasn’t up to date.

Why can something so mundane be so stubbornly hard? It’s not (only) that people are disorganized or tools are bad. As comforting as those explanations may be, there’s a deeper, mathematical reason behind it. That’s what this post is about.

Before coming back to meeting scheduling, I need to lay a bit of groundwork: complexity theory, and the ideas of computational efficiency and complexity classes. These concepts aren’t esoteric, but the notation and jargon can look intimidating at first. Bear with me; we’ll keep it grounded.

Theory

Complexity theory studies the difficulty of computational problems. It matters because it tells you two things:

1. Some problems can be solved efficiently, and it even tells you how to solve them. Take multiplication: given two numbers A and B, compute their product C = A×B. Even for humongous numbers, you—well, your computer—will do this instantaneously.

2. Some problems cannot be solved efficiently, no matter how clever you are or how fast your computers get. Consider the inverse of the multiplication: given C, find A and B. This is factoring. My MacBook factors a 30-digit number in a few seconds. For numbers with thousands of digits, all the computers on Earth running for a lifetime wouldn’t be enough.

Complexity theory is a branch of computer science born out from the work of the mathematicians who designed the first modern computers and the theory behind: Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Stephen Cook, Richard Karp, and many others. It’s been tremendously successful, cutting both ways: speeding-up outwardly complex operations, and leveraging hard problems for cryptographer on the other. It even made it into The Simpsons:

Computational efficiency

So far this sounds like there are only two kinds of problems: easy ones and hard ones. It’s a bit more complicated. First, what do we even mean by efficient?

Efficiency means minimizing the cost of solving the problem. That cost has two main dimensions:

• Time. Not measured in seconds or minutes, but in elementary operations. This avoids tying results to a specific CPU brand or clock speed.

• Space, or memory.

We’ll focus on estimating time. It’s more intuitive, and it also bounds space usage: if writing a byte in memory takes one operation, then any program that uses 1000 bytes of memory must do at least 1000 operations. This means the space cost cannot exceed the time cost. This simple observation has deep consequences.

Time is also expressed in a way that may feel unusual. We don’t say “1492 operations to multiply 20‑digit numbers.” Instead, we express time:

• Relative to the size of the input, usually denoted N. For multiplication or factoring, N is the number of digits.

• As an order of magnitude, not an exact count.

For example, with the naïve schoolbook method, multiplying two N‑digit numbers combines each digit of the first number with each digit of the second. That’s about N×N operations, or N². Not exactly N², but proportional to it. We write this as O(N²), pronounced “big‑O”. It means the cost grows no faster than K×N² for some fixed constant K.

Complexity theory then adopts a simple rule of thumb to define what is efficient/practical/feasible/easy:

1. Any computation with complexity of the form O(Nᴷ)—where again K is a fixed number, like 2, 3, 4.5, 6.127, etc.—is considered efficient. Such complexities are called polynomial. Anything smaller than polynomial is also efficient: O(1), the constant time; O(N), linear time; O(log N), logarithmic time, etc.

2. Anything that grows faster than a polynomial complexity is not efficient. These are called superpolynomial, including the infamous exponential complexities like O(2ᶰ).

In this excerpt from my book, you can see how the exponential function grows faster than the square function:

Complexity classes (and meetings)

A complexity class is a family of problems that share similar time and/or space complexity. There are more than 500 classes catalogued on the Complexity Zoo (and on this other zoo), but only a handful matter to us, Homer Simpson, and to cryptographers:

The class P: easy problems

P as in Polynomial time. All the problems that can be solved in complexity O(Nᴷ) or lower belong to P. As we’ve seen, polynomial-time complexity implies efficient computations, even as the numbers (or whatever the problem is made of) grow drastically.

For example,

• Solving a system of linear equations (that is, equations where unknowns are only combined with additions, and never with multiplications), which has complexity O(N³).

• Scheduling meetings when

  • Everyone is available 9-5.

  • Meetings have fixed durations.

There’s a closely related class called BPP (Bounded error Probabilistic Polynomial time), which allows algorithms to use randomness. Most complexity theorists believe that it doesn’t buy you real power and that any randomized algorithm can be “derandomized” to be doable in P.

The class NP: adding hard problems

NP stands for Non-deterministic Polynomial time. To cut the explanation short, it contains problems for which a proposed solution can be verified in polynomial time, even if finding it takes exponential time or more.

Every problem in P is automatically in NP: if you can compute a solution efficiently, you can certainly verify it efficiently. The converse (a problem in NP is not necessarily in P) is not known to be true, that’s the famous literally-one-million-dollar P?=NP problem.

For example,

• Solving a system of non-linear equations (that is, equations where unknowns are combined with additions and also with multiplications). For example, a system like this one but with many more variables and equations will be practically hard to solve:

  • 2X + Y + 3XY + 5YZ + 10XYZ = 0

  • X + 10Y - 4Z - XY + 91XZ + 3YZ = 128

  • 9X - 8Y + Z + XY - YZ + 121XYZ = 2

• Successfully scheduling a set of meetings given a set of constraints:

  • People may be mandatory of optional.

  • Some meetings must happen before/after other meetings.

  • People have availability windows, days off, preferences.

  • Meetings that have participants in common cannot overlap.

  • Meeting rooms are limited and have their own schedules.

The above are examples of NP‑complete problems: the hardest problems in NP. If you could solve any NP‑complete problem efficiently then you could solve any problem in NP efficiently, because they can all be reduced to one another.

When a problem is at least as hard as an NP-complete problem one, we call it NP-hard. An NP-hard problem may not be in NP: take the problem of finding an optimal solution for our example #2, the meeting scheduling, where optimal is for example “set meetings that satisfy all constraints with the minimal time between the first and last meeting.” This is a much harder problem, because you have no simple way to know if there are better solutions. Thus you can’t efficiently verify a solution, thus it’s not in NP.

This is how P, NP, and NP-complete problems relate, as copied from my book:

Quantum computing

To conclude, consider the class BQP, Bounded-error Quantum Polynomial time. It’s the quantum analogue of P, or what you could solve efficiently if you had a real, scalable, fault-tolerant quantum computer and freedom to run any quantum circuits

We know BQP is bigger than P: quantum algorithms can solve certain problems in polynomial time that classical computer (as far as we know) cannot: for example, factoring and discrete logarithm, which is why post-quantum cryptography is a thing.

HOWEVER, as you can see on this diagram, BQP does not include NP-complete problems. This means quantum computers could not solve meeting scheduling problems, let alone NP-hard optimization problems. I repeat, QUANTUM COMPUTERS WOULD NOT SOLVE NP-COMPLETE PROBLEMS IN A HEARTBEAT.

I experienced this in my early twenties when I first read Léon Bloy (via a friend on some indie hip-hop forum who shared a link to his journal, hosted on a Project-Gutenberg-like platform), and later, in 2006, with Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (via Juan). This post is about another writer I’d call a genius if the term weren’t so cliché and cheesy.

OK, shame on me. I had never read the late David Foster Wallace until three weeks ago, even though Infinite Jest had been sitting on my shelves for a year or so. Since then, I’ve been binge-reading his essays and realized I hadn’t taken this much pleasure in reading in years. The mix of wit, erudition, humor, modesty, Midwestern folksiness combined with his quirks—footnotes of footnotes, nested parenthetical statements, third-person self-references (“your correspondent”), post-postmodern irony, his I-trust-the-reader non-introductions of abbreviations and acronyms, his SNOOTness (see below)—makes his prose highly enjoyable, refreshing, and often hilarious.

On said SNOOTness, from Authority and American Usage, which sent me down the rabbit hole of prescribers vs. describers and into Gardner’s Modern English Usage, whose introduction debates the issue at length and cites DFW:

If you’ve never read him, this gives you a taste of DFWism. And here’s an example of a meta-footnote (from the very same essay):

I initially wanted this post to be a ranking of my favorite essays of his—influenced by internet tier-list culture—but quickly realized this was 1) a bit silly to begin with, 2) unfair, since I haven’t read all of his essays, and 3) even setting #1 and #2 aside, nearly impossible, because all the essays I’ve read so far are brilliant, unique, and on vastly different topics. As an evidence, a cursory online search led me to a Reddit thread asking readers for their favorite DFW essay, and almost every response was different. I’ll just say that Consider the Lobster, perhaps his most famous—and admittedly most accessible—essay is objectively not the greatest, even though he did choose it himself as the title of his second essay collection, published three years before his death.

Instead, I’ll just

1. Encourage you to read his essays (and novels), some of which are available online, and to listen to the recording of his 2005 commencement speech (later published under the title This is Water), and to this 2004 conversation.

2. Encourage you to watch his interviews, most notably the 1997 ~30min one with Charlie Rose and the 2003 ~84min one for ZDF.

3. Share a glimpse of his style, his observational superpower, his attention to minute yet meaningful details, his narration, his earnestness, his humor. See the excerpts below:

3.1. His description of Mike Murphy in Up, Simba, the full, unedited version of his Rolling Stone article about John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign.

He’s a short, bottom-heavy man, pale in a sort of yeasty way, with baby-fine red hair on a large head and sleepy turtle eyes behind the same type of intentionally nerdy hornrims that a lot of musicians and college kids now wear. He has short thick limbs and blunt extremities and is always seen either slumped low in a chair or leaning on something. Oxymoron or no, what Mike Murphy looks like is a giant dwarf. Among political pros, he has the reputation of being (1) smart and funny as hell, and (2) a real attack-dog, working for clients like Oliver North, New Jersey’s Christine Todd Whitman, and Michigan’s own John Engler in campaigns that were absolute operas of nastiness, and known for turning out what the NY Times delicately calls “some of the most rough-edged commercials in the business.”

3.2. This comes dozens of pages after the Murphy character has already been introduced through his role and actions, including this scene (where MONKEY is not monkey, obviously, but one of “the most elite and least popular pencils [i.e., print journalists] in the McCain press corps”):

3.3. In the same essay, on John McCain—reproducing the whole massive paragraph because it’s worth reading, including for McCain’s story itself (so: read it):

Here’s what happened. In October of ’67 McCain was himself still a Young Voter and was flying his 26th Vietnam combat mission and his A-4 Skyhawk plane got shot down over Hanoi, and he had to eject, which basically means setting off an explosive charge that blows your seat out of the plane, and the ejection broke both McCain’s arms and one leg and gave him a concussion and he started falling out of the skies over Hanoi. Try to imagine for a second how much this would hurt and how scared you’d be, three limbs broken and falling toward the enemy capital you just tried to bomb. His chute opened late and he landed hard in a little lake in a park right in the middle of downtown Hanoi. (There is still an NV statue of McCain by this lake today, showing him on his knees with his hands up and eyes scared and on the pediment the inscription “McCan — famous air pirate” [sic].) Imagine treading water with broken arms and trying to pull the life vest’s toggle with your teeth as a crowd of North Vietnamese men all swim out toward you (there’s film of this, somebody had a home-movie camera and the NV government released it, though it’s grainy and McCain’s face is hard to see). The crowd pulled him out and then just about killed him. Bomber pilots were especially hated, for obvious reasons. McCain got bayoneted in the groin; a soldier broke his shoulder apart with a rifle butt. Plus by this time his right knee was bent 90 degrees to the side, with the bone sticking out. This is all public record. Try to imagine it. He finally got tossed on a jeep and taken only about five blocks to the infamous Hoa Lo prison — a.k.a. the Hanoi Hilton, of much movie fame — where for a week they made him beg for a doctor and finally set a couple of the fractures without anesthetic and let two other fractures and the groin wound (imagine: groin wound) go untreated. Then they threw him in a cell. Try for a moment to feel this. The media profiles all talk about how McCain still can’t lift his arms over his head to comb his hair, which is true. But try to imagine it at the time, yourself in his place, because it’s important. Think about how diametrically opposed to your own self-interest getting knifed in the nuts and having fractures set without a general would be, and then about getting thrown in a cell to just lie there and hurt, which is what happened. He was mostly delirious with pain for weeks, and his weight dropped to 100 pounds, and the other POWs were sure he would die; and then, after he’d hung on like that for several months and his bones had mostly knitted and he could sort of stand up, the prison people came and brought him to the commandant’s office and closed the door and out of nowhere offered to let him go. They said he could just … leave. It turned out that US Admiral John S. McCain II had just been made head of all naval forces in the Pacific, meaning also Vietnam, and the North Vietnamese wanted the PR coup of mercifully releasing his son, the baby-killer. And John S. McCain III, 100 pounds and barely able to stand, refused the offer. The US military’s Code of Conduct for Prisoners of War apparently said that POWs had to be released in the order they were captured, and there were others who’d been in Hoa Lo a much longer time, and McCain refused to violate the Code. The prison commandant, not at all pleased, right there in his office had guards break McCain’s ribs, rebreak his arm, knock his teeth out. McCain still refused to leave without the other POWs. Forget how many movies stuff like this happens in and try to imagine it as real: a man without teeth refusing release. McCain spent four more years in Hoa Lo like this, much of the time in solitary, in the dark, in a special closet-sized box called a “punishment cell.” Maybe you’ve heard all this before; it’s been in umpteen different media profiles of McCain this year. It’s overexposed, true. Still, though, take a second or two to do some creative visualization and imagine the moment between John McCain’s first getting offered early release and his turning it down. Try to imagine it was you. Imagine how loudly your most basic, primal self-interest would cry out to you in that moment, and all the ways you could rationalize accepting the offer: What difference would one less POW make? Plus maybe it’d give the other POWs hope and keep them going, and I mean 100 pounds and expected to die and surely the Code of Conduct doesn’t apply to you if you need a doctor or else you’re going to die, plus if you could stay alive by getting out you could make a promise to God to do nothing but Total Good from now on and make the world better and so your accepting would be better for the world than your refusing, and maybe if Dad wasn’t worried about the Vietnamese retaliating against you here in prison he could prosecute the war more aggressively and end it sooner and actually save lives so yes maybe you could actually save lives if you took the offer and got out versus what real purpose gets served by you staying here in a box and getting beaten to death, and by the way oh Jesus imagine it a real doctor and real surgery with painkillers and clean sheets and a chance to heal and not be in agony and to see your kids again, your wife, to smell your wife’s hair…. Can you hear it? What would be happening inside your head? Would you have refused the offer? Could you have? You can’t know for sure. None of us can. It’s hard even to imagine the levels of pain and fear and want in that moment, much less to know how we’d react. None of us can know.

3.4. Different topic, different essay: his footnote on mass tourism in Consider the Lobster, reproduced here as a photo of the printed book, which somehow makes it even more footnoty:

3.5. On yet another topic, Big Red Son offers a critical perspective on the adult industry and its protagonists, and contains many gems such as:

The adult industry is vulgar. Would anyone disagree? One of the AVN Awards’ categories is “Best Anal Themed Feature”; another is “Best Overall Marketing Campaign — Company Image.” Irresistible, a 1983 winner in several categories, has been spelled Irresistable in Adult Video News for fifteen straight years. The industry’s not only vulgar, it’s predictably vulgar. All the clichés are true. The typical porn producer really is the ugly little man with a bad toupee and a pinkie-ring the size of a Rolaids. The typical porn director really is the guy who uses the word class as a noun to mean refinement. The typical porn starlet really is the lady in Lycra eveningwearwith tattoos all down her arms who’s both smoking and chewing gum while telling journalists how grateful she is to Wadcutter Productions Ltd. for footing her breast-enlargement bill. And meaning it. The whole AVN Awards weekend comprises what Mr. Dick Filth calls an Irony-Free Zone.

But of course we should keep in mind that vulgar has many dictionary definitions and that only a couple of these have to do w/ lewdness or bad taste. At root, vulgar just means popular on a mass scale. It is the semantic opposite of pretentious or snobby. It is humility with a comb-over. It is Nielsen ratings and Barnum’s axiom and the real bottom line. It is big, big business.

3.6. And finally, on Lynchianness, from his essay on David Lynch:

AN ACADEMIC DEFINITION of Lynchian might be that the term "refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment within the latter." But like postmodern or pornographic, Lynchian is one of those Porter Stewart-type words that's ultimately definable only ostensively-i.e., we know it when we see it. Ted Bundy wasn't particularly Lynchian, but good old Jeffrey Dahmer, with his victims' various anatomies neatly separated and stored in his fridge alongside his chocolate milk and Shedd Spread, was thoroughgoingly Lynchian. A recent homicide in Boston, in which the deacon of a South Shore church reportedly gave chase to a vehicle that bad cut him off, forced the car off the road, and shot the driver with a highpowered crossbow, was borderline Lynchian. A Rotary luncheon where everybody's got a comb-over and a polyester sport coat and is eating bland Rotarian chicken and exchanging Republican platitudes with heartfelt sincerity and yet all are either amputees or neurologically damaged or both would be more Lynchian than not. A hideously bloody street fight over an insult would be a Lynchian street fight if and only if the insultee punctuates every kick and blow with an injunction not to say fucking anything if you can't say something fucking nice.

That’s it. Hope this gets more people into DFW.

Tractate 9: Rupture

07:00 – 07:23

After we talked, she left and I stayed a little longer watching the crabs. A tiny one scratched the tank’s glass, two larger ones bumped into each other like paralyzed wrestlers. When I got out, she faced a window in the corridor, a little forlorn, immobile save for her lips talking to the glass. Outside, the train drew a flickering shadow over the rocky ground. Beyond it, the frosty plains glinted with the first sunbeams. It had stopped snowing.

She wasn’t alone. Shesh was two meters behind her with two other familiar silhouettes. I walked towards them without hurry.

Shesh pointed the numbers on the door as he glanced down at Czerny’s bulbous head. His corpulence loomed comically over the small man who, hatless and visibly irked, paced like a chihuahua. Czerny’s hands fended off Shesh’s questions but after the rabbi insisted he took a step back and replied:

The nine again? Yes they’re here. No you can’t see them. What’s wrong with that?

He spoke with a rattled cadence and waved his arms like a street preacher. He lowered a hand into his jacket’s inset pocket and fished a yellow document that he unfolded before us. He spoke to Shesh again:

It’s on the train manifest, see. Five: occupied. Six: occupied. Seven: occupied. Eight: occupied. Nine? occupied too. He jabbed a finger at the paper under Shesh’s faces. Seraphina wasn’t paying attention or pretended not to.

It’s just a piece of paper, Kagami said bluntly.

Says he who writes so-called scientific papers about invisible waves and inexistent dimensions? Where’s your imagination gone, professor? Turn a six on its head and you get a nine. Careful professor, the nine hears you.

You are a bad joke, Kagami said. He turned his back to the little man and sauntered into the compartment. Wise man, he doesn’t argue with dunces.

Shesh pinched his beard with thumb and forefinger and eyed Czerny.

You’re saying it holds a spirit? A benevolent one?

You misinterpret, Reb. I’ve pelted you with proofs. The plaque, the manifest, the rest. You confuse the unseen occupant. Face your comeuppance.

I got closer and caught Czerny’s stare. I spoke first:

You also gotta tell us. What’s the deal with the fish and the crabs? Some kind of contraband?

Paul, Paul... You’re sagacious as a lemur. They’re for the nine’s entertainment. I’m a mere fishwarden.

Seraphina inclined her head with her shoulders still parallel to the glass. She wore a gilt earring, a glinting triangle pointing to her shoulder. She looked at me, without darkness.

She turned to Shesh, ignoring Czerny.

There’s a simple explanation for all of this, she said in a soft voice, her right hand adjusting her hair near her temple.

What do you mean? Shesh asked.

Cabin fever, the agony of confined space. He needs help, she added in mock whisper.

What do you think the nine is about? Shesh asked.

Bad math? she said, looking down at Czerny.

Czerny half-raised one hand.

Are you having fun, princess? he said with a rueful grin.

She just looked past him as if the sound came from the wall behind.

I think you’re anxious, Jessica. Is it about the letter?

What letter? she replied, as if to herself.

Czerny paused, tilted his head.

You amuse me, he said. I’ll miss you. What can I tell you? It ain’t too late to repent. Even Shesh’s magic box sees the nine.

Repentance isn’t my business. Her eyes darkened.

Czerny opened his mouth as if speaking without sound. Then he turned and he strolled toward his compartment while whistling the Happy Birthday tune, but the rhythm and the notes were off, which gave it a sullen undertone. He spread his hands above his deformed skull like a parody of a blessing. For the first time, he scared me.

Seraphina and Shesh had watched the scene without a word. The rabbi stood between our compartment’s door and the previous one, his serene smile unaltered. I liked how he took serious matters lightly and innocuous matters overseriously, like this business with the number nine. His gaze followed Czerny’s shape until it vanished in the darker end of the corridor.

I glanced through the window at the drab mosaic of farmland and abandoned fields. A thin layer of snow covered the brown soils, shards of melting ice drifted on the ponds. In the windless landscape nothing moved except flocks of birds and the occasional car along a distant road.

This reminds me of when I was a kid, Shesh said. Freezing winters, farms. Now I live in a city.

You’re from this region? I asked.

No. Not even from this country. But in winter all flat places look alike, don’t they?

I don’t know, I’ve never lived in the countryside.

Before Shesh could answer, he cried out and jerked his arm up as if he’d been bitten by a snake.

Oi yoi! I was shocked. By this door.

He pointed at the handle of compartment 1 2 3 4 and stepped back toward Seraphina. Around the same time, the linoleum beneath my feet trembled.

Then the door 1 2 3 4 slid open.

The elderly woman stepped out. She wasn’t much taller than Czerny. A black velvet headband tied her straw-blond hair. Glasses too large for her square face gave her a severity that reminded me of one of my linguistics teachers, which is not a compliment. She wore a dark beige jacket over a gray dress with a faded tapestry of flowers. The man was by her side, slightly behind, in a mustard-colored linen shirt. At least as old as her, no less than eighty, quite stocky for his age. He had thin patches of hair on the sides of an asymmetrical, otherwise bald skull. His small eyes looked younger and livelier than his pallid hairless face. They stood there in silence, at first more interested in the view through the opposite window than in us Then the woman scowled at Shesh and his handless arm.

Nice to meet you, Shesh said. They didn’t react.

Nice to meet you, he repeated, louder.

The woman and the man scanned him.

She spoke words I couldn’t decipher, in a harsh German-sounding dialect. I caught zu roysch or something like that.

When Shesh responded in the same tongue, the woman softened. He gestured toward our compartment, then toward Seraphina and me. As he spoke, they nodded and punctuated his phrases with nu and richtik. He asked them something. The woman spoke for a while and the man dipped his head in agreement. They went on talking and I didn’t catch a single word.

With a lower and slower voice, Shesh answered a question that I guessed was about his maimed arm. As his index finger traced a line from his elbow to his wrist, he blinked twice and when he stopped talking no one spoke for five seconds. Then Shesh spoke again and they all laughed. After a final exchange the couple told us something that must have meant nice-to-meet-you and stepped back in their compartment.

Very nice people, Shesh said to Seraphina and me. They’re visiting their family, a son and two grandchildren.

Was that Yiddish? I asked.

Yes. My first language. I rarely speak it now, alas.

Kagami appeared behind us. He had changed into a black t-shirt with the logo of a Japanese rock band, or so I guessed.

Mister Shesh, can you come see something please?

Shesh obliged and disappeared into our compartment with Kagami.

Seraphina stepped closer to me:

The lady complained about the noise. Shesh blamed the train’s mechanics, but she didn’t buy it. He called us his good friends.

You understand Yiddish?

I know German, and some Hebraisms too, it helps. Anyway, they also asked about his hand.

Figured as much.

He lost it in a war. He served in a platoon. He said he misses the friends he lost that day more than his hand. I sensed remorse. He made a joke I didn’t understand, something about the train and two beds.

That’s when they laughed.

Yeah. One bed he sleeps in, one he won’t.

After that, we returned to the compartment.

The kudz was on the tray table with Kagami and Shesh sitting motionless around it. The stone shined as if a fire burnt within, a dark cobalt blue fire.

So it serves as a bedside light, Seraphina said when she came in.

I’ve never seen this, Shesh said. Come closer, touch it.

I leaned in and touched the stone. It was warm as a cardboard sleeve around a takeaway coffee. Seraphina pressed her palm against the gleaming surface and held it there for five seconds, as if trying to cool it down.

The kudz began blinking at irregular intervals, its hue growing more luminous. Shesh ascribed it to our touch. He said the square was complete, whatever he meant. Kagami brushed the stone with the back of his hand and said it was heating up. At the same time, cracks like wood splitting and debris striking metal came from the train’s underframe.

Kagami asked what was happening but Shesh answered only with prayers. The strident screech we’d heard earlier returned, higher-pitched this time. The noise below us grew louder and thicker. The stone was brighter than ever.

I told everyone to sit on the floor and cover their heads with their hands. They did, without asking why. Kagami said he needed to get his envelope and the photo from his berth. He stood up.

The train lurched violently and halted. Kagami’s head slammed against the frame of the upper berth and he crumpled to the floor.