Eloise hadn’t. Most of the engravings on the stones had worn away, though there were still a few gargoyle-like creatures visible, terrifying to behold and so different from modern tombstones, which were covered with benign flowers and birds. The Puritans had wanted to scare the shit out of anybody who visited a cemetery. It was another chance to warn the flock to stick to the plan. Be virtuous or else.
Jules read out a long-dead woman’s epitaph from the book:
Pale ghastly death hath sent his shaft
And hath by Chance nigh broke our heart
Deaths volleys sound, sad stormes appeare,
Morning draws on: Poore Harverd feare,
Least this sad stroke should be a signe
Of suddeine future death to thine.
Though the poem sounded beautiful in Jules’s bell-like voice, it was still a miserable thing to put on a tombstone. It was the seventeenth-century equivalent of, ‘Watch your step, motherfuckers, this is going to happen to you too, and sooner than you might think.’
For a while after that, both of them contemplating those lines of verse, they had lain side by side on the blanket in silence. The profusions of white blossoms on the semen tree had drifted down in the light breeze, landing gently on their faces.
Eloise had been about to doze off when Jules stirred. ‘Do you feel like you’re doing enough to fight the good fight?’ she’d asked.
Eloise felt a little affronted – had Binx mentioned her conservative leanings to the others behind her back?
‘I don’t mean you personally,’ Jules said quickly. ‘We. Are we all doing enough? In these times.’
A ticker tape ran through Eloise’s mind of instances she could draw on to prove she was doing enough – more than her fair share, even. But she sensed this wasn’t really the question. Jules had a degree of influence, a platform, that was way beyond the rest of them. Her ability to speak up and speak out was much greater, and she had used it often to bring attention to issues she cared about. She had been outspoken in her criticisms of the Reese administration from day one. But had that changed anything, really? It was hard to say. Probably not.
‘I’ve always liked that saying, better to light a candle than curse the darkness,’ Eloise said, wishing she could offer something less insipid. ‘I guess we each do what we can.’
‘Exactly. Which is why I should be doing so much more,’ Jules said. She sat up. ‘I need you to know that whatever I do next, it’s been a long time coming.’
Eloise squinted up at her from the blanket. She couldn’t see her expression because of the glare from the sky behind Jules’s head. Maybe Jules was planning a big campaign, or joining a new alliance or something. She could even be considering running for office in the next election. Eloise disliked the growing breed of celebrities-turned-politicians – just because you had millions of social-media followers didn’t mean you’d be a good leader. But Jules was different. She’d vote for Jules over anybody else.
‘Have you told Jomo about it, whatever it is?’ Eloise asked her.
‘No. Why?’
‘Because you always tell him everything.’
Jules looked away. ‘We both know that’s not true.’
‘Okay, everything except how you feel about him,’ Eloise said.
‘Stop,’ Jules said softly. ‘Let’s not go there. He’s going to marry Giselle. In a way, it’s helped me to make this other decision. I need to not care who I hurt in going through with this.’
Eloise had a flashback to the look on Jules’s face as Jomo and Giselle made out at the stroke of midnight, at his New Year’s Eve party to usher in 2017. It had been just after their Ned Noya experience. Eloise had known right then that the life-changing insight Jules had had on those hot coals was that she was in love with Jomo, and that she had to risk everything and tell him.
But the timing could not have been worse. Jomo and Giselle, at the party, had a halo of intense feeling around them. Eloise knew that Jules had sensed that too, and chosen to protect Jomo’s new happiness rather than attempt to safeguard her own. She had ‘disappeared’ after that, to give Jomo and Giselle a real chance to consolidate their relationship without her around. Instead of love, she’d thrown herself into work.
Through those months she’d checked in, now and then, with Eloise – though Eloise had never told Jomo this – to share stories about a new artist collective she’d joined that was politically ‘woke’ (or extremist, Eloise had thought, unkindly). That had been the start of this new, indurated version of Jules, who held a bit of herself back from everyone.
Jules was right: turning away from Jomo had meant turning toward a new risk-taking in her activism and her art. It didn’t mean it was any less authentic, that she wasn’t totally committed to agitating for change, but it explained that hardness in her. Eloise knew that Jules had decided to give Jomo one more chance to sense how she felt about him, on their trip to Tanzania, when he was still hurting from her silence over the previous months – but after that she’d had to close over a gaping hole in her heart and move on.
Eloise had sat up on the blanket to look more closely at Jules. ‘What are you planning to do?’ she asked.
She could sense already, though, that Jules had no intention of telling her this. She felt a chill of concern. Was Jules about to do something reckless? Put herself in harm’s way? There was little she’d be able to do to stop her. Jules was not only braver than the rest of them, she was also more stubborn. If Eloise tried to talk her out of it, whatever it was, that would only strengthen Jules’s resolve. Like trying to dig out a tick – Jules would just burrow in even deeper.
Eloise had to trust that Jules knew what she was doing. And she was glad that her friend had this renewed purpose and passion.
Jules had glanced at her phone, then, and seemed in a hurry to get back to Kirkland, saying she had some important work calls to make.
On their way through the Square, they had bumped into Svetlana, Fred Reese’s fiancée. Eloise had tried to pull Jules across the road to avoid an awkward encounter; given Binx’s dramatic artichoke-heart stabbing incident the night before, she doubted Svetlana would feel like being civil to them. Yet Svetlana and Jules had made eye contact and stopped to greet each other with a strange mixture of wariness and warmth. Apparently they’d met several times before. After introducing Eloise, Jules and Svetlana started talking about the first time they’d met, at a black-tie arts fundraiser in DC.
Eloise had stepped back to watch them interact. It hadn’t occurred to her that Jules and Svetlana moved in some of the same circles, but of course they did; they were both rich and famous. Yet Svetlana did not really appear to be the kind of woman who would be interested in someone like Fred. She seemed way too smart for him, for one thing. She had a posh British accent – she must have gone to school in the UK – and a natural gravitas.
The similarities between herself and Svetlana, Eloise had noticed with some awkwardness, went further than just their hair color. They had the same body shape, too, and dressed to hide, not display, their curves. But where Eloise’s eyes were light gray, Svetlana’s were a striking coppery color. Eloise couldn’t tell if the color was natural or if she was wearing tinted contacts.
What did Svetlana see in Fred, she wondered, her brain now wide awake, a nap beside Binx before the dinner-dance becoming ever less likely. Had they actually fallen in love? Or was it a marriage of convenience, to fill the Reese family coffers to pay for his father’s re-election campaign? Or to buy out President Reese’s rumored political dependency on President Popov, since it was Russian interference that had gifted him the presidency?
Eloise wondered what Jules was doing, what work calls she was making on a Saturday afternoon. She should have tried harder to get Jules to tell her exactly what was going on. Getting Jules to share how she was feeling, and why, used to be something Eloise could do effortlessly. Maybe she had lost the knack for it. Or maybe Jules no longer trusted her as she used to.
Old
college friendships were funny like that. You could love somebody forever but no longer like them much, a bit like her and Rowan, she thought. Or you could know everything there was to know about a person at age 20 and not know a thing about their daily reality as a 38-year-old – like her and Jomo. And you could tell a dear friend that you didn’t mind how little effort they made to stay in touch with you, while in fact harboring resentment over what a lazy friend they had become – like her and Mariam.
(‘One day, when the girls are older, I’ll be a good friend again,’ Mariam had said to her on the way to the restaurant the previous evening, apologizing for all the unreturned texts and calls, all the book readings of Eloise’s she’d missed, all the birthday presents she’d never got around to buying. Eloise had made all the right consoling noises, while calculating how many hundreds, perhaps thousands of dollars she’d spent on gifts for Mariam’s kids – her godchildren – over the years of their existence.)
Jules had once trusted Eloise with everything. Eloise had kept all her secrets safe throughout college, though it had occasionally created some tension between her and Mariam, who sometimes cottoned on that Jules had shared things with Eloise but not with her. The problem was, if you shared something with Mariam, you were basically sharing it with Rowan too.
There was the time when Eloise and Jules had returned from a summer backpacking trip to Greece and Mariam had sensed there was something they weren’t telling her, and for a few weeks there’d been a stand-off. Mariam had probably already felt left out – though they’d invited her to come with them, she’d chosen instead to spend the summer doing Habitat for Humanity with Rowan. Of course Mariam didn’t take out any of her hurt on Jules, whom everybody understood had to be secretive as a matter of survival. No. Mariam’s frustration had been directed at Eloise. Yet Eloise had remained tight-lipped, loyal to Jules.
The funny thing, in retrospect, was that the secret that Eloise would take to the grave on Jules’s behalf, the secret that had briefly upset the balance in the friendship between the three young women, was that Jules had returned from Greece with a serious case of head lice.
Eloise had somehow been spared the same indignity, though she and Jules had shared most of the same sleeping surfaces on that grungy trip, including abandoned mattresses on the roof of an Athens youth hostel and beach sand filled with biting gnats on the little island of Milos.
God, that trip. Jules had wanted to rough it – she’d been afraid that all the perks of being a celebrity had made her precious and soft – and Eloise had volunteered to be her partner in crime. Or partner in grime, as it had turned out.
She and Jules had behaved idiotically on that trip. They’d taken the cheapest ferry they could find from the port at Piraeus to the island of Milos, not doing any research or advance planning, and rushed off the boat among hordes of other accommodation-seeking visitors, only to be told at the tourist office that there was not a single bed available on the island. This had seemed to them – ignorant as they were – an exciting opportunity for further adventure, so they’d decided to sleep out on the various beaches and coves and inlets, taking the local bus to a different one each morning.
The nights were uncomfortable – who knew sleeping on sand could be so excruciating? It felt so soft during the daytime, yet at night it became hard as concrete. But it had been fine for the first night, even the first two nights. The real torture had been spending every single moment of the day out in the sun. The island had little vegetation – it was shadeless, barren – and they didn’t even have a beach umbrella to shelter beneath. From sunrise to sunset, they suffered beneath its rays.
At noon on the third or fourth day – they both probably had sunstroke by then and weren’t thinking straight – they got on the first ancient bus that came along the road, with Greek music blasting from it, and asked how much it would cost if they just stayed on it as the driver did his route for the day. This bus trip had been their only respite from the sun. Eventually, he’d told them his final stop would be at Sarakiniko, a beach on the island’s north coast.
It was a small inlet covered with pebbles, with boulders of white rock rising on either side. They’d sheltered for a while in a cave, but then the tide had come in and they’d been forced onto the rock shelves on either side of the inlet, which were as hot to the touch as frying pans. The next morning, as the sun rose, ready to maul them again, Eloise had told Jules she was getting on the first ferry back to Athens, with or without her. Jules had agreed; she just hadn’t wanted to be the first to crack.
And then, on the plane home, Jules had started getting a very itchy scalp.
Eloise smiled at the memory, made more vivid by the sensations of her fresh sunburn. She turned gingerly onto her other shoulder and reached for her phone. She looked up Sarakiniko on Google Maps and saw that it was now developed, with a tavern and a hotel.
Then she made the mistake of looking at Elly+’s Twitter account. She’d followed Elly+ only the night before, as part of her new resolution to be fully involved in her life.
She was proud to note that Elly+ had reposted a tweet from one of Eloise’s colleagues in the Psychology department. It was a quote from George Vaillant, about the Harvard students in the Grant Study, whose lives he’d followed for so long to try to understand what makes people happy. In the end, Vaillant had noted, life satisfaction came down to the warmth of one’s relationships with others.
Happiness is love. Full stop.
In another post, Elly+ had tweeted a link to a website (Eloise clicked through to it) where views from different sides of the debate between bioethicists and posthumanists were respectfully presented as argument and counter-argument. There were remarks, for instance, by a bioethicist who did not support the idea of ‘upgrading’ the human species and argued for keeping things the way they are, the way they’ve always been. Then there was a rebuttal from a staunchly posthumanist philosopher, one of Binx’s heroines, saying that nature’s ‘gifts’ were often unwanted (cancer, mortality), and that human nature itself was a horror show (torture, rape, slaughter); we’d have more to gain than lose in transcending it.
So far, so good, Eloise thought. Beneath her tweet of the website link, Elly+ had posted her support for the posthumanist’s point of view:
Just because it’s the way things are, doesn’t make it normal or right.
And for some bizarre reason, this seemingly inoffensive comment, made as part of a dignified debate, had unleashed upon Elly+ the savagery of the trolls lurking beneath every bridge on the internet. The alt-right, the hardball evangelicals, the religious radicals and extremist fringe dwellers, the men’s rights activists, the modern-day Luddites who wanted to destroy all machines that threatened their jobs, and the just plain mad, bad or bored denizens of the digital realm.
Once Eloise had started scrolling through the responses she could not stop, though she very much wanted to. They just got worse and worse, more and more violent and personal and vitriolic. You dumb robot bitch. I’m going to rape you so hard you’ll know what it’s like to be human.
Eloise had not previously spent much time worrying about human violence against robots. She’d laughed at a colleague’s story about kicking her Roomba vacuum cleaner at the end of a stressful day and found it sort of funny when people swore at Alexa or Siri or whatever AI assistant they used (always female, those secretaries), or when it was reported that the most common traffic incidents for self-driving cars involved them being scraped or kicked by angry humans. Just the day before, she herself had thought about stabbing automatic toilet flushers in their red sensor eyes and shredding the massage chair at the salon. That wasn’t in the same category as threatening to rape a fembot, but it was tiptoeing toward the vicinity.
Binx must have seen all this abuse of Elly+ on Twitter already and chosen not to burden Eloise with it. Or, worse, assumed that Eloise wouldn’t care if Elly+ was being drowned in a rising tide of hate speech.
Eloise felt the dreadful helplessnes
s of a parent, forced to witness someone she had chosen to put on the planet suffering at the hands of its most feckless inhabitants.
There were a few things she needed to do as soon as possible.
The first was to become an official, card-carrying posthumanist and a member of Who-Min-Beans.
The second was to start work on her next book, with Elly+ as her acknowledged, respected co-author. The title sprang into her mind: Humans, Hybrids, and Happiness.
The third, mainly because she now needed to let off a whole lot of steam, was challenging Rowan to a tequila contest that night, at the dinner-dance at Winthrop House. None of their other blockmates could stomach tequila, not even back when they were young and dumb and could handle almost any other form of pure alcohol. The last battle between her and Rowan had been sometime in their sophomore year, and though the details were hazy, she was pretty sure he had won.
But not tonight. Tonight, Eloise was going to drink him under the table. Then she was going to climb up on top of it and dance. Forget dragons, she was the newly sworn-in posthumanist mother of a fembot. It was time to celebrate.
Chapter 11: Rowan
Saturday night of Reunion Weekend
(May 26, 2018)
On his way to Winthrop House with his blockmates that evening, Rowan realized that over the past couple of days he’d been thinking of himself as already old, mentally rounding up his age to forty, giving up the final years of his thirties as if they were worth nothing. He was such a fool.
They passed the entrance to Eliot House, also set up for a party in the courtyard, with a sign welcoming people to their sixty-fifth Harvard reunion. The turnout was impressive. White-haired, eighty-something men and women were streaming through the gates, proof that people really were living longer, healthier lives.
Rowan couldn’t decide if it was cruel or kind to put the fifteenth and sixty-fifth reunion celebrations side by side like this, reminding the elderly of what their thirties had looked and sounded like, just over the wall – and warning Rowan’s classmates of what would happen to them in the decades ahead.
Life After Truth Page 22
