Life After Truth

by Ceridwen Dovey

  Now that the imagined resistance was no longer there, Eloise had nothing against which to shape her response to the question of parenthood. She felt as if she were falling into a different void.

  At least the most crucial decision had been made. They could let Ana know they would not be needing her services as a surrogate. Thinking about this, Eloise was flooded with a relief so visceral it suffused her whole body.

  She laid her hand on Binx’s jutting hip.

  They had stayed up the night before until the break of dawn, hashing everything out in front of Elly+, at Eloise’s request. Elly+ had quietly observed Eloise and Binx’s nocturnal conversation, maybe able to sense that, given the situation, it was best for her mostly to listen.

  Eloise had vowed to her wife that she would, from now on, participate fully in the creation of Elly+. She would hold nothing back from her android double. Binx was open to the idea of one day creating a partner fembot for Elly+, based on her own consciousness, though she’d said it would need to wait until she reached the age of 30 and could access her full trust fund income.

  She’s not yet 30! Eloise had thought at that moment, once again startled by Binx’s youth. By the time Binx approached her own mid-life crisis at 40, Eloise would be sailing toward 50 in what she hoped would feel like the calm after the storm.

  Who knew, though; it seemed that every female milestone came with a side serving of some fresh hell that nobody had warned her about – or perhaps they’d tried and she had not heeded the warnings of the elderly crones whispering the truth around their cauldrons. Eloise had seen her mother go through years of endless, relapsing menopause. And then, once she’d finally emerged on the other side of it, she suffered such bad sleeplessness that she’d started taking hypnotic pills that caused sleep paralysis, and she’d wake in the night unable to move.

  Eloise felt grateful that she’d be able to avoid the body-muddling mess of pregnancy and birth. Mariam had once told her that, had they not lived in modern times, nine of the ten people in her mothers’ group would have died of birth or post-birth complications. Eloise knew this was only scratching the surface of the things that mothers dealt with physically – to know the fullness of the trauma, you had to become part of that group yourself. It was closely guarded information, in part, Eloise guessed, for the survival of the species. If women knew what they were walking into, instead of supporting male fantasies like space travel to Mars they’d be out on the streets demanding that every single medical research dollar get poured into inventing artificial wombs.

  An idea dawned on Eloise as she lay there, unable to nap.

  Maybe Elly+ could help her answer some of the most fundamental questions within the field of hedonics! Most machine learning was about using AI to make predictions of behavior (usually, given the commercial imperatives, about what a person might buy, browse, or binge-watch next). What if Eloise could use Elly+ as the basis for creating happiness avatars to better guide people’s choices? A person could type in their information, their background, a few fears and desires, some anxieties and hopes, and be given a personalized prediction of what was most likely to make them happy in the future. Like a ‘prospection’ bot! The Prospector. That would be a great name for it.

  It would be especially useful, Eloise thought, to people reaching midlife, turning forty, which was the age Kant had been when he published Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. (When Eloise had first learned that – in her early twenties – she’d thought of forty as old.) Kant believed that it was only at forty that people reach adult maturity and – with some effort and discipline on their part – acquire a ‘moral character’ that remains unchanged for the rest of their lives. In a way, she mused, it was similar to Erikson’s idea of periodic psychological crises, that, if resolved, could become opportunities for growth; Erikson had probably read Kant.

  That night she and Binx would be going their separate ways, each to their own reunion events, though the plan was to meet up for the afterparty at the Spee. Binx’s fifth-reunion dinner-dance had been ‘Quadded’, as per custom: held in the Quadrangle within the old Radcliffe campus – in another universe, so far as Eloise and her blockmates were concerned.

  They’d always been spoiled by being in Kirkland House, at the center of things. On the day the outcome of the upperclass house lottery was announced in the Yard, there was always some sympathy for the Quadlings – though really it was more schadenfreude. Rowan had made it a point of pride never once to go out to the Quad while he was at college, Eloise recalled. He could be a real dick like that, though he claimed always to be on the side of the downtrodden.

  She sighed. Everybody had their blind spots.

  Rowan probably assumed she and Binx would never be friends with him again after what he’d said at the dinner table the previous night, but in fact she wasn’t angry with him, and Binx never held grudges.

  He had said aloud some of the things Eloise had long thought privately. And she understood that many parents’ defenses were so forcefully maintained that they could feel threatened by any vision of parenthood that deviated from their own. For her and Binx this question of whether or not to be parents, and how, and through what method, was still sort of theoretical. For Rowan it was raw and real.

  She should text him to say there were no hard feelings. And Mariam too, who was probably still punishing Rowan for his behavior. Their morning had most likely not been as fun as hers. Their daughters – her goddaughters – were wonderful and all, but they were also such hard work. All children were; she’d learned that in the course of her research on parenthood and its counter-intuitive effects on personal happiness.

  But Eloise sometimes wondered if the intensity of Rowan and Mariam’s parenting style had created mini-monsters of need. They hadn’t even sent them to preschool, though these days it was fairly affordable, especially if they were prepared to enroll them in the public system. If the message you gave your children was that they can’t manage a thing without you, then they naturally made sure they couldn’t manage a thing without you. At last night’s dinner, before things soured, Mariam had told Eloise a story about her battles to teach Alexis to button her own shirts and tie her own shoelaces. The kid was already 5!

  This was not a generous nor productive line of thought, so Eloise swerved out of it, like changing lanes in traffic. It was one of the most useful things she’d learned from the Paraliminal recordings to which she used to listen regularly. They’d taken a while to get used to – the way the voice of the guide leading the meditation switched from the left to the right earphone, and ran different narratives simultaneously in each ear – but they’d seemed to work for her, distracting both hemispheres of her brain so that her unconscious could be accessed more directly.

  She hadn’t listened to them again, though, not since the last World Philosophy Day. She’d been asked to give a talk at the Newton Free Library and she’d recommended to the audience some Paraliminal meditations she’d downloaded online. A man in the crowd had stood up, agitated, and said she was being brainwashed by these recordings, that the alt-right was using them to recruit members by distributing subliminal hate speech. ‘Why do you think it’s called white noise?’ he’d said.

  The rest of the audience had shooshed him and he’d left in a huff, but since then, Eloise had begun to worry that she was inching toward becoming more politically conservative, not because she was getting older or because of a genuine shift in her values, but because of the subliminal messaging in these meditations. Just as she had gone from being a liberal to being somewhere in the center to now toying with elements of traditional conservative thought, what if she one day woke up to discover she had become a bona fide alt-righter, with a swastika tattoo and a white-pride t-shirt?

  She halted this hideous thought in its tracks too, and decided instead to review her morning.

  Binx’s friends, the five-year reunionees, had given her a warm welcome at the float-building party on the Charles River �
�� as if she were a celebrity of sorts for being married to Binx. Most of them weren’t yet paired off, settled down, buttoned up. They were used to interacting in more open-ended ways, and they’d been so accommodating to Eloise. There was none of the ghosting of partners that she’d seen so many of the spouses of her own classmates subjected to, left to sip their drinks just outside the closed-off social circles.

  Jules had texted late in the morning, as she and Binx were heading back home, asking Eloise if she wanted to join her ‘tramping among our old friends from the Colledge at Newetowne’. To anybody else, the message would have been gibberish.

  At home, Eloise had changed out of her swimsuit, while Binx – glad on Eloise’s behalf that she was going to get some time with Jules – made sandwiches for her to take along for a picnic lunch.

  ‘Tramping’ was how she and Jules referred to the mini-expeditions they’d started making in their freshman fall, as new roommates and friends. As a high-school graduation gift, Jules’s mother had given her a leatherbound copy of a book published in the 1930s, Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636–1936, written by one Samuel Eliot Morison of the Class of 1908, later a Harvard professor himself. It was filled with references to sites of historic interest in Harvard Square and the neighborhoods beyond, and on Saturday afternoons Eloise and Jules would set off together with the book for a brush with history.

  Her friendship with Jules had been forged, really, on those expeditions around the ‘Colledge at Newetowne’, which was what Harvard College had been called in the seventeenth century, when it was nothing more than a single schoolhouse at the edge of a cow pasture.

  The golden rule of tramping was to wear your oldest shoes – a rule they’d made after being caught in a storm visiting a site in Allston and had ruined their sneakers wading through muddy fields to get home. Perhaps Jules hadn’t brought any old shoes with her, though, because when they’d met up in the Yard that morning she was wearing a pair of sneakers that looked like they’d just been taken out of the box.

  Beneath her baseball cap, Jules looked tired; she’d told Eloise that she had hardly slept the night before. Eloise didn’t need to ask why. Jules had probably been worrying about the conflict within their blocking group, the note of discord on which the night had ended.

  Eloise had stuck to the original rule and was not only wearing dirt-encrusted sports shoes but had also put on her yuckiest tracksuit pants. Jules had laughed when she first saw Eloise, and spontaneously embraced her, though Jules was not normally an enthusiastic hugger. One of the worst things about being famous, Eloise had learned from Jules, was that total strangers tried to hug or high-five her all the time, as if it were the most normal thing in the world; as a result, Jules wasn’t a fan of hugging even her closest friends, though she’d always made an exception for Jomo.

  ‘New perfume?’ Eloise had said to Jules as they peeled themselves apart. ‘What’s this one called?’

  She knew that Jules had, since college, tagged each year of her life in her own memory by changing the scent she wore every time spring came around. It didn’t hurt, Eloise thought, that she probably got sent a lot of perfumes just for being Jules. But it wasn’t an extravagance for her, it was a tool to transport herself back to key moments while acting, accessing memories and emotions from her past.

  ‘Assassin,’ Jules had said, with dramatic emphasis. ‘I’m not sure if I like it. It smells like cloves, and my grandmother used to make me bite on cloves if I had a toothache, some Swedish peasant remedy.’

  They were walking to the Old Burial Ground on Garden Street. According to Three Centuries of Harvard, which Jules had brought along with her – dog-eared and rain-spattered, an artifact of their past tramping – the Old Burial Ground was where the earliest colonists had been buried after the settlement of Newetowne, later named Cambridge, was founded in 1636.

  The settlers’ first cemetery, on Brattle Street, had been abandoned after wolves disturbed the human remains, which was now almost impossible for Eloise to imagine. Wolves on Brattle Street? But this was part of the magic of these excursions, that the regular ground she trod on shifted and the familiar buildings around her fell away entirely. Even Kirkland House was built on what had once been tidal marshlands; villagers had taken ferries from a nearby wharf, across the river to Boston.

  There was nobody else in the cemetery, which looked wild and untended; just as a cemetery should look, in Eloise’s opinion.

  ‘Oh no,’ Jules had said, sniffing the air as they entered the burial ground.

  Eloise took a sniff. The air smelled unmistakably of sex.

  ‘It’s those Bradford pears again,’ Jules said. ‘Look, over there.’

  Above a row of wonky gravestones, the branches of a beautiful tree hung in full blossom. These trees flowered every spring around the Square, making the entire campus smell as if it had been sprayed in semen. She, Mariam, and Jules had once tried to find the right words to describe that particular smell and the best they’d come up with was soapy water in a used tuna can.

  ‘The Puritans buried beneath that tree must be turning in their graves,’ Eloise said.

  They’d started to giggle, which often happened on these expeditions. Three Centuries of Harvard was itself partly to blame. With its portentous tone, and the extreme reverence with which dear old groveling Samuel Eliot Morison treated Harvard’s history, it was sometimes impossible to read from it and keep a straight face. Jules, who’d been scanning the paragraphs about the cemetery for tidbits, pointed to someone’s description of John Harvard after his death in 1638:

  The man was a Scholler and pious in his life and enlarged toward the cuntry.

  ‘How very lucky for the cunt-ry!’ Eloise said, and that was it for both of them for a while.

  Finally they’d managed to get themselves back under control.

  On the long grass beside the modest tombs of seven former presidents of Harvard College, Eloise had laid out the picnic blanket. Among the tombs, Jules told her, was that of the first president of Harvard, Henry Dunster, supposedly identified when the tombs were opened up by historians in the eighteenth century.

  ‘They found his skeleton inside a coffin filled with tansy, which was a local herb they buried people with to cover the smell of decomposing,’ Jules said.

  ‘Thanks for ruining my enjoyment of this ham sandwich,’ Eloise replied.

  ‘Sorry.’ Jules scanned another passage. ‘“In Dunster’s time, students paid their board and tuition in commodities, like a form of barter,”’ she read aloud. ‘“They could pay in beef, mutton, and cattle on the hoof; wheat, corn, rye, and barley; malt, flour, and meal; butter, eggs, and cheese; turnips, apples, and parsnips; even boots and shoes, various sorts of cloth, boards and hardware, and, in single instances, a saddle and a sword. Such of these commodities as the College Steward was unable to turn into drinkables and eatables he had to sell, somehow. Half Cambridge was shod with the shoes that John Glover, a merchant’s son, turned in for his college expenses.”’

  Eloise caught her eye, in danger of succumbing to another fit of mirth.

  ‘Remember the expedition we took to find the original location of the Boston–Charleston ferry service, which was the university’s only guaranteed income?’ Eloise said.

  ‘And it was mostly paid in wampumpeag!’ Jules said, looking delighted that Eloise had recalled this. ‘Those white and purple shell-beads that the Bay Colony used as small change.’

  ‘I bet my parents wish they’d been able to pay my tuition in wampumpeag,’ Eloise joked, not without some guilt. Like many of her classmates, her parents had saved up their entire working lives to be able to afford her college fees when the time came. She’d done her part, getting accepted to Harvard. Then they’d had to cough up $35,000 a year for four years. It made her feel dizzy just thinking of it. Had it been worth it? Had she been worth it?

  It was another good reason for her and Binx not to have a child. Actually, they would more than be able to afford tuition at
an Ivy League school – she needed to stop thinking of herself and Binx as being middle class. With Binx’s trust fund and her book earnings and professor’s salary, they were edging toward being, if not 1 per centers, then at least something like 20 per centers.

  Eloise had sometimes wondered what Jules’s net worth was. Money and earnings were off-limit topics with Jules; she thought that people who talked about how much they earned were gauche. In Hollywood, she was probably asked all the time how much she made; she must have had to learn to close down those conversations fast.

  She’d been one of the highest-paid actresses in the world for a while, in her twenties, thanks to some of the blockbuster films she’d headlined, but lately she’d been opting out of those sorts of movies, instead doing indie dramas and off-the-beaten-track projects. Her bank balance must have suffered, Eloise thought, but perhaps she hadn’t even noticed the dent, since her coffers were so full to begin with. Wealth didn’t matter to Jules – and Eloise had always understood that Jules was telling the truth about that – but now that Eloise was herself wealthy, she also knew that it wasn’t something you wanted to have and then lose.

  ‘Is the guy who was in charge before President Dunster buried here? You know, the one who got fired for beating students with a stick?’ Eloise asked Jules.

  ‘His name was Master Nathaniel Eaton. And he didn’t get fired for beating them with a stick, it was a . . . wait . . .’ Jules searched through the book. ‘It was a walnut-tree cudgel.’

  Their eyes met. A snort of laughter escaped from Eloise. She lay back on the picnic blanket, feeling more serene than she had in a long time.

  ‘Did you see the tombstone with the poem on it?’ Jules asked her.