How considerate of me.
You tried eggnog for the first time at the last one. You called it the most disgustingly wonderful thing you’d ever tasted, said it was a good thing it was a strictly seasonal drink, otherwise you might drink it year-round and pack on a shitload of weight.
I don’t know whether that’s an endorsement or a warning on eggnog. Do you have to go again this year? Is that why you’re mentioning it?
Yeah. But I don’t know if I’ll go. Nobody would blame me for not showing up. I’m sure they’d expect it.
They’d expect you to still be grieving?
I blinked stupidly at the message, confusion flavored with a tinge of affront washing over me. Of course I’d still be grieving, don’t you know what a death can do to a person? It was a miracle I’d survived as long as I had. How could that go unrecognized? Grief wasn’t a light switch you could turn on or off; it came and went as it pleased, didn’t need an invitation or excuse to gate-crash.
But how did you go about explaining that to a machine?
I slid a coffee mug across the kitchen island and Joe caught it by the tips of his stained fingers, jerking his head at the table, where I’d left the composite sketch.
“What’s this?”
I cursed myself for not putting the damn thing away. I didn’t want to get into this. Not again. “Matthews stopped by a few nights ago.”
Joe picked up the sheet of paper, staring into the drawing’s piggy eyes. “He’s got some nerve. Who’s this supposed to be?”
“Person of interest, I guess. I should throw it away. I’m sick of looking at it.” To Joe’s surprised glance, I said, “I can’t go back to that place. I can’t go back to obsessing and wondering if everyone I’ve ever met is the one who did it. You remember how bad it got.”
Joe nodded, tactfully neglecting to agree aloud that hell yes, it had been bad. There was one memorable incident where I drank myself stupid all day and tried my own hand at being Sherlock Holmes. The across the street neighbor was a lecherous perv who had always paid too much attention to Carissa. It had always infuriated me, the unabashed way his eyes would linger over her, but back then, back when she was still wonderfully living, I’d had to admit that I could hardly blame him. I’d be doing the same thing if I were her neighbor. I’d be stealing her mail, pretending it had been misdelivered to have an excuse to bring it to her. I would have peered through my blinds, watching for her to leave the house so I could run outside too, pretend I’d left something in my car for the chance to see her, to trade smiles and waves that would hopefully turn into one of those hour-long conversations that happened in romantic comedies.
But then she’d been killed, and his disgusting yet understandable voyeurism became suddenly nefarious. All those times he’d sat on his front porch drinking beer had been him casing the joint, sizing up our house for the easiest access points. He could have been watching that night, sitting in the dark on his porch, pounding beer after beer. He could have seen me storm out and thought NOW.
Which was how I found myself on his parched yellow lawn, chucking all his empties at his front door, hurling accusations and obscenities at the top of my lungs. It had taken Joe a whole ten minutes to drag me back into my own house, and I’d been lucky the police hadn’t been called.
“How are things?” he asked after inhaling a slug of coffee. “Aside from Detective Matthews paying you a visit.”
Joe’s here, I texted Carissa. I’ll be back later. Not sure when.
“Okay, I guess.” I pushed my phone away. Joe followed the movement, arching an eyebrow, adding more wrinkles to his lined forehead. “Debating putting in an appearance at my work Christmas party. It’d be weird going without Carissa. And I don’t know how long I’d be able to handle all of the how are you holding ups and people walking on eggshells.” I took a sip of my own coffee. “You?”
“I’m getting there. Slowly, but I am.”
But I didn’t believe him any more than Carissa ever did after I’d told her she never looked fat, she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. The first snow of the season had fallen a few days earlier. Snow slowed construction projects, giving Joe more time to think, more time to wallow alone at home, whiling away the hours with his good friend Jack Daniels.
I turned back to the stove, stabbing at fried eggs with a spatula. “How’s work been?”
“At a complete standstill for now.”
I flipped the eggs over and added a mound of cheddar. “Well, if you—”
“Ben. What is this?”
I tossed a glance over my shoulder and found Joe cradling my cell phone in one calloused palm, jaw hanging slack.
“What the hell is this? Please tell me you know another Carissa.”
I abandoned the frying pan and snatched the phone back.
“Is this why you’ve been attached to your phone? I wondered why you never put it down. You’d never clung onto it like that before.”
I’ll be around, she’d replied. You know I’m always here. “It’s not really what it looks like,” I said, exiting out of her text.
“It looks like you’ve given her phone to someone who’s pretending to be Carissa.”
“Maybe it is what it looks like, then.” I couldn’t meet his bulging eyes. “You remember that woman from the cemetery? The one who ran into you?”
“Yeah…?”
“She works for this company that can simulate the way a dead person speaks. Or texts, anyway. They ran all her communications through this software, her text messages and emails and—”
“Ben.” He clapped his hand around my wrist, ducking his head to meet my eyes. “That’s crazy. You need to give it up. You’ll never move on if you keep up with this shit. How are you supposed to get over her when you’re doing something like this, talking to a cheap imitation?”
I shook his hand off. “It’s making me feel better. How is that wrong?”
“It’ll never be her, that’s why it’s wrong.” He waved a hand at my phone. “All that is is false hope, a one-way ticket to Limbo.” He backed away like I was a ticking time bomb and he didn’t want to hang around for the explosion. “I get why you’re doing it, I really do. It’s a tempting idea, but it’s not going to help in the long run.”
I almost said something snide. I almost said, look at you, Joe, look how your grief is serving you. When’s the last time you took a shower, shaved? At least I can function, at least I don’t smell like a dive bar and a pack of cheap smokes at nine thirty in the morning. How do I look from up there on your high horse? From down here, you look like you’ve got one foot in the grave.
But I couldn’t say that to him, the guy who’d mopped vomit off my face and tucked me in on a few occasions, the only guy I knew who could relate completely to the hell I’d found myself inside.
“I need this right now. I’ll cut it off before I get too attached, but for now...it feels like my only way through this.”
I looked away so I didn’t have to see his hurt expression. We used to say our only way through it was each other, but what was hanging out in a cemetery going to accomplish? How would I find my way back to something resembling normalcy by drinking and moping, swapping stories about our dead girls that would inevitably end in a crying jag?
“You need to let her go, Ben.”
“I could say the same thing to you,” I snapped. “Glass houses, and all that.”
He pressed lavender eyelids shut, shaking his head. “I’m not mad…I’m just scared for you. Worried.” He exhaled loudly into the silence and slapped the kitchen island. “I guess I’m heading out. I’ll check in with you later. Just think about what I said.”
I watched him leave, the side door swinging shut behind him. The scent of scorched cheese assaulted my nostrils, and I dumped the contents of the frying pan into the trash. My appetite had left with Joe.
Just let her go. How could I? I hadn’t even been able to after the first huge fight we’d had. I’d blocked the door, repeating
the same thing over and over: We need to talk about this, you can’t just leave when things get hard, stop acting like a teenager. She kept repeating the same thing too: Just let me go, Ben—why won’t you let me go?
T hanks for coming in.”
I hadn’t realized I’d had much choice in the matter. Jess’s voicemail was pretty insistent. I’d listened to it for a second time on my short walk to the office, past an empty, depressing park and a black pond, mirrorlike but for the white puddle frothing beneath a stream of water crashing from a man-made waterfall.
Leave your car in the park’s lot, she’d instructed. We don’t like cars parked on the street.
Jess sat back in her desk chair, aiming a stained red smile my way. “So, how’s it working out so far? Any problems?”
The only problem was something nobody could do anything about: She was still dead. “She doesn’t have any knowledge about certain things, but I guess that’s because it was stuff she didn’t mention in any of her emails or texts.”
She picked up a loose pen on her desk, depressed the point in and out. “Yeah, that’s something we don’t have a whole lot of control over. She should be remembering your conversations, though. Things you’ve mentioned since you started this program. Is she?”
“Yeah.”
“So generally, things have been okay? There haven’t been any instances where you weren’t able to get a hold of her for long stretches?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“And she sounds like herself, as far as you can tell?”
“Pretty much. Is this just a check-up or something?”
“Or something. How would you rate your experience so far on a scale of one to ten?”
“Is that a serious question?”
“You’re getting this for free for a reason.” Her painted eyebrows looked like wings contracting over the wide mountain slope of her nose. “You’re helping us test it. How would you rate your experience?”
“I don’t know.” I shifted uncomfortably in my seat as the overhead light panels pulsed like a strobe light, illuminating the whites of her eyes and her teeth. It only ever happened in five second stretches, but it took me by surprise each time, like each burst of light was a message. “Maybe a seven?”
“Why’s that?”
“Well, I like the fact that she’s always there, always responds, but at the back of my mind, I still know it’s not her.”
“You’re really going to penalize me for that, are you?” she asked, but her red lips were smiling, heavily made-up eyes crinkling at the corners. “You knew that going in. Is it really fair to knock points off my final grade when I’d already given you the extra credit answer? If you didn’t know it was a machine, would it fool you?”
“I guess—”
She blinked, furry lashes fluttering. “Then it’s done its job.”
“But I can’t forget what it really is. I can’t magically forget that it’s not her. It’s not like I can hear her voice or anything.”
“Is that something you’d be interested in?”
“That’s possible?”
“If you have enough recordings or videos of her speaking, then yes. But it hasn’t worked very well for most of our testers, only one has had a decent experience. But then her boyfriend had his own YouTube channel, lots of material for us to work with. Do you know what a phonetic pangram is?”
“No.”
“Well, you’ve heard of “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog,” right?”
“It has all the letters in the alphabet.”
“Yeah. But a phonetic pangram has all the forty sounds in English. They use all the phenomes rather than all the characters. Not that we’re ever likely to come across a recording of someone saying are those shy Eurasian footwear, cowboy chaps, or jolly earthmoving headgear? and even if we did, the one phrase alone wouldn’t do much for us. That phrase might get every English sound, but not every variant. If you try to jam vowel samples segmented from the wrong context into a synthesized voice, at best you’ll get something that sounds scarily inhuman; at worst it’ll be completely unintelligible. And they certainly don’t capture the giant range of prosodic contexts—stress, rhythm, questions, exclamations, whatever. In speech synthesis labs, they need at least a few hours of a voice actor’s time to get a good result. Which is why we’ll need a crazy amount of videos or voice records to see what we can do. So. No promises.” She shrugged her hair back. “In the event that it works, it’ll take longer for the computer to comb through everything. Longer than with the texting. Probably somewhere around three days.”
I thought of Joe’s face right then, the expression he’d wear if he knew how seriously I was contemplating talking to a machine mimicking Carissa’s voice. If my mother knew, she’d try to commit me. Carissa herself would lightly suggest I ought to lie down, take a few ‘me’ days, think this horrible idea over before signing myself up for that shitshow. Honestly Ben, what good can come of this?
From the knowing look she gave me, I had a feeling Jess was well aware of my internal argument with myself. “So what’s the verdict?”
I hauled out my cell phone. “I’ve got a lot of videos on my phone, but she’ll have a ton on hers, too. She did vlogs all the time for work, stuff like makeup tutorials, some interviews, those kinds of things.”
She caught sight of something behind me as she reached for my cell, something that made her smile widen and her eyes glitter.
“Ben, this is Nick.” She jutted her chin, and I turned to find the male equivalent of Jess looming behind me, arms crossed against his chest. The same mussed hair, the same combination of layered hoodies, the same self-impressed smirk/smile I wanted to rip off his face. “Nick’s the owner of the company, and also my boyfriend.”
I accepted his hand and echoed his nice to meet you.
The chair from the empty adjacent cubicle screeched horribly over the floor as he yanked it over and sat on it backward like some kind of Zach Morris character, folding his arms across the top. “Who’s the dead person? Girlfriend?”
“Fiancée.”
“How’s it going so far? You liking it?”
I thought then that if Jess’s bedside manner left a lot to be desired, Nick’s was a lost cause.
“Yeah, I guess.”
“You guess?” He and Jess exchanged the kind of knowing glance Carissa and I used to trade a million years ago. “I want that on my testimonial page once the website’s up and running.”
“He might be interested in voice calling.” Jess ran a hand through the longish hair around his neck.
“That so?” He tilted his head into her hand traipsing through his hair, gaze fastened on mine. “You have enough video or recordings?”
“I think so.”
“It’d be great to get another viable tester in on that technology. Only had one so far—”
“I told him about the YouTuber—”
“—most everyone else who tried it out had less-than-desirable results. Well, what the fuck can you expect from a bunch of old biddies whose dead husbands didn’t even have Facebook and never heard of Instagram?”
I gave a weak forced chuckle, which was what I suspected he wanted.
“Well I’ll let you kids get back to it.” He pulled himself up on the back of the chair, exhaling loudly. He leaned into Jess for a kiss and pulled back with the sound of a plunger, wet lips shining as he tossed a smile at me. “See you around, Ben.”
I watched him go, wending his way past our chairs and out of the cubicle, disappearing but for his fingers, which lingered longer than was normal around the side of the dividing wall.
I hadn’t gone to any kind of social gathering since Carissa’s death, and her absence at the Christmas party left me feeling unsettled, like I’d forgotten my pants.
It’s only an hour, I repeated in my mind like a mantra, grimacing my thanks to the suited employee of the Prudential who held the door open for me. How bad can one hour be?
W
orse than I’d thought, I found, once I realized I hadn’t been physically around any of my coworkers since long before that awful July morning. My company had closed its last Boston office in May, rendering all of us who had commuted there work-at-home employees. Which meant my appearance wasn’t the incognito one I’d been banking on, though I assumed that happened when your fiancée turned up so brutally murdered.
I should have been grateful so many people cared. I shouldn’t have been plotting escape routes, sizing up exits, avoiding gazes like the bubonic plague. It was the receiving line of Carissa’s funeral all over again, people coming up in pairs or groups of three, probably too uncomfortable to approach me alone.
“I’m sorry,” I lied, “I’ve just seen Jason, and I really need to talk to him for a minute.” I sidestepped Jenelle and Liv, shrugging out of the grip the latter had on my shoulder. “But thank you.”
“Coyotes got to you, huh?” Jason asked as I joined him, struggling up to the bar. He leaned one elbow on the counter, raising an eyebrow over the rim of his scotch glass.
I caught the busy bartender’s harried eye and pointed to Jason’s drink, then to myself. I’d need something stronger than beer to get through this. “Coyotes?”
“Yeah. Coyotes wait until prey is weak and wounded. Neither of them had a chance up against Carissa, did they?”
I threw an uncertain glance over my shoulder back at the pair of women.
“Trust me.” He swallowed a sip, shaking his head. “Liv’s no more a fairy nymph than I am.” He paused. Laughed a little as he swilled the contents of his glass. “Of course, that’s not saying much, is it?”
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