Nineteen Minutes Read online

  Peter tilted his head. "I thought it was a really big cat."

  "Either way, it's totally gross." She shuddered. "Ugh. How am I going to take a paycheck from that guy's hand now?" Then she looked down at Peter. "What else can you do with that computer?"

  "Anything," he bragged.

  "Like . . . hack into other places? Schools and stuff?"

  "Sure," Peter said, although he didn't really know about that. He was just starting to learn about encryption and how to make wormholes through it.

  "What about finding an address?"

  "Piece of cake," Peter answered. "Whose?"

  "Someone totally random," she said, and she leaned over him to type. He could smell her hair--apples--and felt the press of her shoulder against his. Peter closed his eyes, waiting for lightning to strike. Josie was pretty, and she was a girl, and yet . . . he felt nothing.

  Was that because she was too familiar--like a sister?

  Or because she wasn't a he?

  Stop looking at me, homo.

  He did not tell Josie this, but when he'd first found Mr. Cargrew's porn site, he'd found himself staring at the guys, not the girls. Did that mean he was attracted to them? Then again, he'd looked at the animals, too. Couldn't it just have been curiosity? Comparison, even, between the men and him?

  What if it turned out that Matt--and everyone else--was right?

  Josie clicked on the mouse a few times until the screen was filled with an article from The Boston Globe. "There," she said, pointing. "That guy."

  Peter squinted at the caption. "Who's Logan Rourke?"

  "Who cares," Josie said. "Someone who looks like he has an unlisted address, anyway."

  He did, but then, Peter figured that anyone running for public office probably was smart enough to take their personal information out of the phone book. It took him ten minutes to figure out that Logan Rourke had worked for Harvard Law School, and another fifteen to hack into the human resources files there.

  "Ta-da," Peter said. "He lives in Lincoln. Conant Road."

  He looked over his shoulder and saw his smile spread, contagious, over Josie's face. She stared at the screen for a long moment. "You are good," she said.

  *

  Economists, it was often said, knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. Lewis considered this as he opened up the enormous file on his office computer, the World Values Survey. Gathered by Norwegian social scientists, here was data collected from hundreds of thousands of people around the world--an endless array of details. Simple ones--like age, gender, birth order, weight, religion, marital status, number of children--and more complex accounts, like political views and religious affiliations. The survey had even considered time allocation: how long a person spent at work, how often he went to church, how many times a week he had sex and with how many partners.

  What would have seemed tedious to most people was, to Lewis, like a roller-coaster ride. When you started to sort out the patterns in data this massive, you didn't know where you'd twist or turn, how steep the fall or how soaring the heights. He'd examined these numbers often enough to know that he'd be able to quickly crank out a paper for next week's conference. It didn't have to be perfect--the gathering was small, and his higher-ranking peers wouldn't be present. He could always take whatever he eked out now and polish it later for publication in an academic journal.

  The focus of his paper involved putting a price on the variables of happiness. Everyone always said that money bought happiness, but how much? Did income have a direct or causal effect on happiness? Were happier people more successful in their jobs, or were they given a higher wage because they were happier people?

  Happiness wasn't limited to one's income, either. Was marriage more valuable in America or Europe? Did sex matter? Why did churchgoers report higher levels of happiness than nonchurchgoers? Why did Scandinavians--who scored high on the happiness scale--have one of the highest suicide rates in the world?

  As Lewis set about picking through the variables of the survey using multivariate regression analysis on STATA, he thought about the value he'd have put on the variables of his own happiness. What monetary compensation would have made up for not having a woman like Lacy in his life? For not getting a tenured position at Sterling College? For his health?

  It didn't do the average person much good to know that marital status was associated with a 0.07 level increase in happiness (with a standard error of 0.02 percent). On the other hand, tell the Average Joe that being married had the same effect on overall happiness as an additional $100,000 a year, and it put things into perspective.

  These were the findings he'd reached so far:

  1. Higher income was associated with higher happiness, but in diminishing returns. For example, someone who made $50,000 reported being happier than the man with a salary of $25,000. But the incremental gain in happiness that came from getting a raise from $50K to $100K was much less.

  2. In spite of material improvements, happiness is flat over time--relative income might be more important than absolute income gains.

  3. Well-being was greatest among women, married people, the highly educated, and those whose parents didn't divorce.

  4. Women's happiness was declining over time, possibly because they'd reached greater equality with men in the labor market.

  5. Blacks in the U.S. were much less happy than whites, but their life satisfaction was on the upswing.

  6. Calculations indicated that "reparation" for being unemployed would take $60,000 per year. "Reparation" for being black would take $30,000 per year. "Reparation" for being widowed or separated would take $100,000 per year.

  There was a game Lewis used to play with himself, after the kids were born, when he was feeling so ridiculously lucky that surely tragedy was bound to strike. He'd lie in bed and force himself to choose what he was first willing to lose: his marriage, his job, a child. He would wonder how much a man could take before he reduced himself to nothing.

  He closed the data window and stared at the screen saver on his computer. It was a picture taken when the kids were eight and ten, at a petting zoo in Connecticut. Joey had hoisted his brother up, piggyback, and they were grinning, with a striated pink sunset in the background. Moments later, a deer (deer on steroids, Lacy had said) had knocked Joey's feet out from beneath him and both boys had fallen and dissolved into tears . . . but that was not the way Lewis liked to recall it.

  Happiness wasn't just what you reported; it was also how you chose to remember.

  There was one other finding he'd catalogued: happiness was U-shaped. People were happiest when they were very young and very old. The trough came, roughly, when you hit your forties.

  Or in other words, Lewis thought with relief, this is as bad as it gets.

  *

  Although Josie got A's in math and liked the subject, it was the one grade she had to fight for. Numbers did not come easily to her, although she could reason with logic and write an essay without breaking a sweat. In this, she supposed, she was like her mother.

  Or possibly her father.

  Mr. McCabe, their math teacher, was walking through the rows of desks, tossing a tennis ball against the ceiling and singing a bastardized Don McLean song:

  "Bye, bye, what's the value of pi

  Gotta fidget with the digits

  Till this class has gone by . . .

  Them ninth graders were workin' hard with a sigh

  Sayin', Mr. McCabe, come on, why?

  Oh Mr. McCabe, come on, why-y-y . . ."

  Josie erased a coordinate from the graph paper in front of her. "We're not even using pi," one kid said.

  The teacher whirled around and tossed the tennis ball so that it bounced on the boy's desk. "Andrew, I'm so glad to see you woke up in time to notice that."

  "Does this count as a pop quiz?"

  "No. Maybe I should go on TV," Mr. McCabe mused. "Is there a Math Idol"

  "God, I hope not," Matt muttered from the desk behind Josie. He