Life After Truth

by Ceridwen Dovey

  Rowan felt a bit sick. This was a model of Eloise’s brain. He should never have touched it.

  ‘I’m in your hands now,’ Eloise said, from the study door.

  To cover his shame at being caught snooping, Rowan went on the offensive. ‘So are you a posthumanist too?’ he said, in what was meant to be a teasing tone but came out harsher than he intended. ‘Is this the step before the mind upgrade, or did you already get a newer brain implanted?’

  She crossed her arms and said nothing.

  This frustrated Rowan – why wouldn’t Eloise rise to the occasion and take him on like she used to at college, when they would sometimes argue and debate over minor philosophical quibbles for hours?

  But then he realized that she looked genuinely upset.

  As Rowan stepped forward to apologize, his hands fumbled. The brain slipped through his fingers, and the glass cover shattered on the floorboards.

  It was as if, in retribution for her clear intellectual superiority, he had tried to smash her mind to pieces.

  He knelt to pick up the biggest pieces of glass. The brain itself seemed to be made of squishy foam; it had bounced once and rolled, unharmed, toward the door.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Eloise said. She nudged her brain with the toe of her pointed high heel. ‘I didn’t actually like it very much.’

  She turned and left him sweeping the glass shards into a pile with his hands in penance. He picked up Eloise’s brain and wiped it with a Kleenex, then placed it very gently back on the shelf. It looked like a misshapen lump of plasticine that a child had played with and abandoned.

  Rowan went looking for a brush and pan to clean up the rest of the mess. The crush in the corridor had eased; people were starting to head out. Close to the entrance hallway, the door to the guest bathroom was wide open. As guests were leaving, they were running the gauntlet through a smell so foul it was almost like a physical barrier.

  He recognized the unique scent of his daughter’s shit, as a hands-on dad always will.

  ‘Ready to wipe!’ Alexis hollered from inside the bathroom.

  The other parents standing nearby, who were trying to get their device-addled kids up and off the couch, gave Rowan sympathetic smiles that did not fool him for a moment. They were all thinking, Thank God it’s not my kid who ruined the party.

  Chapter 4: Mariam

  Thursday night of Reunion Weekend

  (May 24, 2018)

  Mariam was trying to decide which flavor of J.P. Licks ice-cream she wanted. The line behind her wound out the door of the small shop on Mass Ave, directly across from the Yard. She, Eloise and Binx had waited twenty minutes to order, and now that they were almost at the front counter, Mariam was paralyzed by indecision.

  The previously warm evening had turned chilly. It made no sense that so many people were here getting ice-cream, except that really they had come for something else: a taste of their own pasts. This ice-cream store had been in Harvard Square for decades, and had seen many an undergraduate through heartbreaks, final exam periods, spring flings.

  Jomo and Jules had already gone outside, their waffle cones loaded with bubblegum flavor, which was probably why they were best friends: who else on earth but them could stomach ice-cream that tasted like toothpaste? Several patrons had recognized Jules and asked to take selfies with her, to which she had gamely agreed, with Jomo glaring at the interlopers with just the right amount of menace so that they had, at least, moved on quickly. After that Jules had put on what Mariam and the others referred to as her citizen’s disguise: a baseball cap into which she tucked her blonde hair and a jacket with the collar turned up.

  It was so rare for Mariam to be out on the town with her old friends, the night stretching luxuriously before them. She wanted every moment of it to be perfect.

  She’d been studying the people ahead of her in the line, squinting to make out the graduating year printed on their lanyards. Many wore them around their necks, some probably because they were old and forgetful – like the bunch of merry sixtieth-reunion classmates – and others because they were middle-aged and still wanted to believe they were special, like the group of men there for their twenty-fifth reunion who’d tried repeatedly to make casual conversation with Jules.

  Neither Mariam nor her friends were wearing their lanyards. But give them another decade, she thought, and maybe they, too, would never take them off. She could not have imagined, for example, back when they’d graduated, that returning to this place as alumni would become so important to her and Rowan. They had been blasé about the fifth reunion and skipped it, but she knew in her bones that they would never miss another reunion again, not for as long as they lived. It was like being let into Narnia through the magic wardrobe once more, or taking the train on platform 9¾ to Hogwarts.

  That was why all these ex-students had returned, and why alumni from different graduating years, no matter how far apart, smiled at one another with dumb-luck disbelief as they crossed paths around the Square. Can you believe it? We’ve been allowed back in! those smiles said.

  ‘Hey, you’re up,’ Eloise said beside her. ‘Thirty seconds, or I’m choosing for you.’

  Mariam knew Eloise was making a joke about Mariam’s trademark indecisiveness, but she also knew that something weird had passed between her and Rowan earlier in the evening. As he was leaving the welcome drinks with Alexis and a Tupperware container filled with leftover food, he’d said something about breaking Eloise’s brain.

  One of the things she appreciated about Eloise as a friend was that she didn’t let the occasional friction between her and Rowan get in the way of her friendship with Mariam – she didn’t treat them as if they were the same person. Mariam had learned in fifteen years of married life that many people seemed to think of them as if they were a single organism, an amoeba blob incapable of separate words, thoughts, or actions.

  Maybe it was because Eloise had met her before she and Rowan became a thing – to be fair, only a few hours before, on freshman move-in day, but still. It felt like an important distinction. Both Eloise and Jules had met the pre-Rowan version of her. That was a self Mariam could hardly remember. What had it felt like to be just Mariam? Not Rowan + Mariam. It had probably felt pretty crappy. In fact, she knew it had.

  Mariam noticed a new offering at the back of the double row of ice-cream tubs: President Reese’s Pieces of America.

  The shop was staffed by local hippies, which explained the wording of the handwritten flavor notes:

  As (pea)nutty as the president himself, and with an aftertaste as bitter as the morning after he was elected. We urge you to try Reese’s (Broken) Pieces of America, and then do something about putting them back together.

  And shame on you, Frederick P. Reese II (Class of ’03).

  By the looks of the still-almost-full tub, the alumni had been giving the flavor (or its accompanying sentiments) a wide berth. Mariam was about to order it, as loudly as she could – why not wear her politics on her sleeve? – when Eloise spoke to the server.

  ‘She’ll have two scoops. Green tea and lychee.’

  Another thing she loved about Eloise was that she always knew what Mariam wanted before she did; Mariam disliked the taste of peanut butter almost as much as she disliked President Reese.

  ‘God bless you, woman,’ Mariam said to Eloise.

  Then she wished she had not invoked God’s name as a joke. Her relationship with him – whoever he really was – was very new, and extremely private. She thought of her conversations with God as taking place offline, and she wanted to keep it that way.

  At some stage, she’d have to tell Rowan about it.

  But not yet. Because once she did, he would try to talk her out of God, just as she had once talked him out of his own faith, back when they’d first started dating.

  She’d been a raging atheist then, like many 18-year-olds. Rowan, on the other hand, had been a lapsed but still semi-committed Catholic, more out of loyalty to his Puerto Rican mom, who’d rais
ed him mostly solo, than out of real God feeling – or so Mariam had believed. His musician roadie dad had drifted in and out of his life in a way that had not seemed to trouble Rowan much – his dad was kind, he paid his child support on time, and he’d never misled Rowan’s mother as to the nature of their arrangement, given his choice of work and lifestyle. From when Rowan was 10, each summer his dad had taken him on the road for a month, and Rowan had loved being on the band’s tour bus, sleeping in a bunk bed above his dad, learning how to tune guitars and cook pasta dinners for twenty people.

  Mariam had slowly chipped away at his faith. It had been so easy to get him to surrender it, really. Like cleaving off soft chunks of clay rather than stone. The uncomplicated way he’d let it go had reassured her, in her occasional moments of guilt, that she’d done the right thing in asking him to choose her over God, a fight she had known she wouldn’t lose. She was the first woman who had ever allowed Rowan inside her body: what abstract God could compete with that?

  It had pained Rowan’s mother, though. On his visits home during college, Mariam knew it had been hard for him to refuse to go with his mom to church. It had been a routine – a habit – they’d enjoyed together most of his life. But he had rebuffed her nevertheless.

  Mariam took her ice-cream cone and moved away from the counter where Eloise and Binx were ordering. At the door, she bumped into someone she’d known at college. They’d both been in chess club, but Mariam couldn’t remember her name.

  This woman, who was very thin, told Mariam within moments of saying hello that she’d lost her first husband to a rare form of aggressive cancer, and remarried within a year. ‘They say that people who have been happily married remarry much more quickly if a spouse dies,’ the woman said, a burr in her throat. ‘Though you’d think it would be the other way around, right?’

  Why is she telling me this? Mariam thought, put off by that kind of instant oversharing. But then she decided to meet this woman halfway. ‘It makes sense,’ she said. ‘If you know what a happy marriage brings to your life, why wouldn’t you want to find that again as soon as possible?’

  The woman nodded, and Mariam felt good about giving her, in some tiny way, further permission to move on. Then Eloise and Binx joined them, and when Mariam didn’t introduce her, the woman realized that Mariam didn’t remember her name. Their moment of connection had passed.

  She left without buying an ice-cream, and as Mariam ate hers on the way to the Fly Club with her friends, she felt it chill her heart a little on the way down.

  Binx had persuaded them to come along with her to a party being hosted at the Fly for her fifth reunion. Jomo had tried to talk them into coming to the Spee instead – and it was true that the Fly had always been among the douchiest of the final clubs, and was even now fighting a legal battle over the university’s sanctions against all-male social clubs.

  But Eloise wanted to play spouse for Binx at the party, in return for her having done the same all evening. So the others had overcome their reluctance and decided to embrace spontaneity like they used to at college – going whichever way the winds blew on weekend nights. Due to Jomo’s attachment to the Spee, those winds had usually ended up blowing them through its red front door, which had created some problems for Rowan; it was fine for the women to get in, but male students who weren’t members had been soundly and firmly turned away.

  ‘Do you think Jules is okay?’ Mariam said to Eloise, who was walking hand in hand with Binx.

  Jomo and Jules were strolling farther ahead.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Eloise said.

  ‘She seems pensive. Sad, or something.’

  ‘It’s how she often gets just before she makes a major life decision,’ Eloise said. ‘Remember how she was just before she decided to do the semester in Sweden?’

  ‘But that’s what I mean,’ Mariam said. ‘Think of everything she was dealing with at that point in her life. It wasn’t a simple decision about whether or not to go to Sweden. She was in crisis mode.’

  Eloise said nothing.

  ‘After all these years, I still don’t know if I should just ask her outright if she’s okay. You could,’ Mariam said. ‘But I feel I have to walk on eggshells with her sometimes, especially when it comes to asking her about private stuff.’

  ‘She clams up with me too, if she feels she’s being asked to share something she’s not ready to share,’ Eloise said. ‘Just give her time.’

  Mariam was about to say something else when she saw – as if they were the ghosts of college past, present and future – the Traitors Three approaching from the opposite direction. In spite of the cool change they were wearing short cocktail dresses and towering, strappy heels, their arms interlinked, their smiles as fake as ever. There was still time to cross the road to avoid an encounter, but Jomo and Jules – lost in conversation – did not notice them until it was too late, and out of a common sense of propriety they were all forced to stop and exchange greetings.

  ‘Jules!’ one of them said, leaning in to kiss her cheek. ‘We were just talking about whether you’d come to the reunion.’

  ‘Did you hear my news?’ said another, holding out her hand to show off a gigantic diamond.

  They seemed to be warming up for a full session of updates and gossip. The insolence of these women! And yet Mariam saw that Jules would have indulged them had Jomo not whisked her forward, away from them and their greedy eyes. They coveted everything Jules had, and would have taken it all from her again if given the chance.

  The Traitors Three: Tiffany, Kashvi, and Wenona. It had been so long now since Mariam had thought of any of them, which was selfish of her, she realized; Jules would never have the luxury of forgetting what they’d done. Those naked images of her still no doubt circulated in the shadiest nooks and crannies of the internet, were probably still in the spank banks of countless disgusting men around the world, and had been seen by almost all their classmates.

  This was why Jules had decided to escape to Sweden in their junior spring – to a place where her Illinois family had ancestral links and where few people would notice her among all the other ash-blonde beauties. In regular emails to Mariam and Eloise, she’d described the fishing village where she lived, on the Baltic Sea. There were explosions day and night from the military camp farther along the beach, she’d written, where the Swedes trained ceaselessly, convinced that if the Russians came for them it would be over the sea, from Lithuania.

  It had sounded dismal to Mariam. Jules had been the research assistant to a marine biologist in order to get course credit, but she’d spent most of her time helping the local fisherwomen catch and skin eels, which involved putting a wire ring around their necks while they were still alive and ripping it downward to take off their skin. Mariam had never forgotten that image, because it summed up how she imagined Jules felt at that time, as if her own skin had been ripped from her body, leaving her underlying sinew and bone exposed.

  The only small mercy had been that the betrayal had happened in an era before social media. It was so low-tech, how the Traitors Three – the T3s, as Mariam thought of them – had done it, spying on Jules naked in her room and taking photographs with a camera that used actual film.

  They had claimed afterward that they’d never intended to sell the pictures. That they’d been blackmailed by the guy at the photo store who had developed the prints, who had said he would sell them anyway, without them getting any cut of the profits, if they didn’t go along with his plan. They’d said they had taken the photos as a practical joke, that it was harmless fun between friends, as if it were just as easily something Mariam or Eloise could have done.

  The university’s administrative board had taken disciplinary action. The T3s were forced to take a leave of absence for a semester, and were banned from setting foot on campus during their exile. They’d transferred from Kirkland to Lowell House together after their return and had been pleased to discover that they’d gotten exactly what they’d wanted: a bit of Jule
s’s fame had rubbed off on them, for they were forever after touched by the dark energy of notoriety.

  If Jules had a character flaw, Mariam thought, it was that she’d welcomed people like that into her life when she was younger. Back then, Jules had not yet learned the hard way that when classmates approached her as potential friends she was not obliged to respond kindly to their advances. She hadn’t wanted to seem stuck-up or choosy, so she’d sometimes fallen in with girls like the T3s, not realizing that often the people most bold in seeking her out were the ones she needed to avoid.

  Eloise and Mariam had also, of course, been the beneficiaries of this openness when Jules first arrived at college. There had never been any friendship waiting period with Jules; their mutual bond had been formed on the very first day. Yet they had not approached her, or sought her out – they’d been housed together by the university, which they’d all accepted as a happy accident of fortune.

  For Mariam, the worst aspect of the whole fiasco had been that the T3s’ initial approach to Jules had been under the banner of feminism. They had invited her, sometime during their freshman year, to join them in trying to create a new, all-female final club, to level the uneven playing field of social life at the university. A place where women could go to socialize outside of their dormitories, so that they would not be forced to go en masse to the all-male final clubs, knock on the imposing front doors in their nicest dresses, and beg to be let in by whichever drunk boy answered. At that stage, there were only a couple of sororities on campus, and one struggling women’s club that hadn’t been able to raise enough money to secure its own building.

  The T3s had exploited Jules’s latent zealotry. She’d been searching for a principled cause, as if to offset what she sometimes felt was a professional life of Hollywood frivolity and extravagant waste. And in those horrible women and their proposal to start a women’s club, Jules thought she’d found it.