Lingering

by Melissa Simonson

  N ick summoned me to 311 Emery the following day and had become supremely annoyed that I couldn’t make it in until well after seven p.m., given that I’d have to finish work and battle Boston traffic.

  When Jess finally delivered me to him in the vestibule off that little room where I’d first seen Carissa, his demeanor was more than a little ornery.

  “How kind of you to grace us with your presence.” He gave me a mock bow and turned the handle of the door leading into what I’d begun to secretly think of as the interrogation room.

  Carissa’s head had been bent over a sheet of paper, but she looked up as the door opened. Her hair had been tied back in a thick braid falling over one shoulder, and I’d been about to ask whether she’d done it herself when I noticed what she was doing.

  “What are you doing?” I blinked stupidly at the pencil she held.

  “Drawing.”

  “Why?”

  Nick pulled out a chair and pointed me toward the one beside his. “What else is she supposed to do?”

  She laid the pencil down, her gaze flickering between the two of us. “He wondered what I’d draw if I had to choose something myself.”

  I accepted the sheet she pushed over and couldn’t decide if I wanted to laugh. “Dexter?”

  “I took a lot of pictures of him.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you like it?”

  It was an uncanny likeness of the stupid cat, I had to admit. Right down to the feathery ends of his orange fur, the two whiskers above his haughty left eye and three above the right. I’d seen that scowl on his face just that morning while he waited for me to feed him his breakfast.

  “Yeah. It’s very accurate.”

  Nick drummed his fingers on the table. “Did you bring what I asked you to?”

  What he’d asked for as he’d walked me to the exit on my first day meeting Carissa had flummoxed me. How could music be helpful, prove anything?

  Do you ever wonder why a certain song always makes you happy? he’d asked me, leaning against the wall in the foyer of 311 Emery, his arms roped against his chest. Haven’t you ever seen a crying baby suddenly start laughing and dancing when they hear a particular song? Surely you’ve gotten chills listening to music at one time or another. Music is a magic beyond anything I can do in this lab. It can make you smile, cry, laugh, dance…there’s something so intangible about the effect it can have on people. And I want to see if there will be any effect on her.

  So I’d dutifully compiled a playlist of every song I’d ever heard Carissa sing along to, every track she told me she’d loved in high school, bands from The Offspring to Muse to AC/DC and Taylor Swift. It hadn’t been a physically difficult task, but it made my heart ache to remember her half sloshed on wine as she made dinner, singing along to the oldies songs I’d been shocked to realize she knew every word to.

  “Yeah. I’ve got the playlist on my phone.” I paused, one hand on the phone in my back pocket. “Do you mind if I ask her something first?”

  Carissa wore that carefully blank expression again, and I still couldn’t work out what it meant. In life, it meant she was pissed. I hated seeing that deadpan look because it meant I’d done something stupid. Again.

  Nick gave me an if you must wave of his hand.

  “Do you know what month we visited Martha’s Vineyard?”

  I’d thought to ask her that when I was in bed the night before, hovering somewhere near the cusp of sleep. Her answer would be telling, but I didn’t know what I’d do about it either way.

  “May.”

  No. July. I figured if she chose to lie instead of saying she didn’t know that she’d choose either April or May, the months where rain was most likely to fall. We hadn’t made the engagement Facebook official until August, when rain would be most unlikely.

  A bone deep sense of disappointment washed over me then, and I realized how much I’d wanted her to get the answer right. It wouldn’t have erased all doubt that this would never be her.

  And I wasn’t sure if she could somehow divine that disappointment, the way she continued to stare at me long after I’d asked that fateful question.

  “Do you think you can bring Dexter here?”

  “The cat?” I asked, as if there were any other Dexter we knew.

  “You’re not bringing a goddamned cat into the cleanroom,” Nick said.

  “Don’t you think the fact that she wants to see him is interesting?” I certainly thought so, but Dexter would be spitting with fury after a car ride over in his little cat bomb shelter. I doubted he’d be cuddly by any definition after being shut away and subjected to Boston traffic. He’d probably slice her silicone skin to ribbons, and I had no wish to see the cording and cables beneath.

  “I’ll think about it,” he said, and I knew my point had hit home. “Get out the playlist.”

  “Does this have anything to do with why you powered me down last night?” she asked, her tone like reinforced concrete and drenched in suspicion.

  It was silly, I told myself, to be so irrationally angry that Nick had round the clock access to this Carissa machine while I didn’t. This wasn’t really her, and I had no rights to his property, but the knowledge that they had conversations I wasn’t privy to and long blocks of time alone down in the bowels of the mill infuriated me.

  “A lot to do with it, yes.” To my expectant look, he tacked on, “I’ll tell you about it later. Just take out your phone.”

  So I did, and pulled up Spotify, tapping on the playlist. “Anything in particular or should I just let it play?”

  “Whichever.”

  I pressed shuffle, because what’s life without whimsy, and set the phone on the table. I had to crack a grudging smile at the opening bars of the song. Every single time Carissa had played it, I’d groan and feel my testosterone levels plunge to zero. And if I wasn’t mistaken, Nick felt the same way, based on the indistinct noise of disgust he uttered.

  For her part, Carissa just looked politely bemused.

  “You have to wait for it,” I told her. “This one takes a while to get going.” And because I couldn’t help myself, I added, “You gotta have faith.”

  Nick grumbled something to do with lame puns and poor taste. At the jarring entrance of the guitar, Carissa blinked at me, her fingers flexing into her palm.

  When the lyrics started, she lowered her gaze to the table. The closer I examined her, the more worried I got, because for some reason, she appeared to be vibrating like she was having some kind of malfunction, a robotic seizure, a stroke-like glitch.

  I flung my hand against Nick’s shoulder at the same time his chair screeched against the floor as he pushed himself away from the table.

  Her face, stony and impassive, showed no outward sign of distress, but neither had my laptop before it crashed, and how different was her brain compared to a CPU?

  It was Nick’s turn to smack me, his head under the table, his palm rapping my shin. I twisted sideways in my chair and stuck my head beneath the table too, following the path of his pointed finger.

  “I think she likes it,” he said, looking like he’d just won the lottery. “I’ve never been so happy to hear George Michael.”

  Though the baggy scrubs had puddled around both of Carissa’s feet, there was no mistaking the rapid movement of one. She was jiggling one foot in time to the drumbeat of ‘Faith.’ Seeing another too-humanlike gesture made my stomach flip the way it had when my school bus had driven over bumps in the road back in grade school.

  We stared at her vibrating foot for a little while, both our heads stuck under the table. Nick slanted me a sideways look, a smile creeping over his thin lips.

  “I guess you do gotta have faith.” He slapped me on the knee and yanked himself out from under the table.

  Later, he told me one of the members of his Swiss team had an affinity for jazz music, which he constantly played in the background whenever he paid visits to Margot when she was very young. For some reason, the music so di
sturbed her that she snatched the man’s phone off the table one day and powered it off. Asked why she’d done such a thing, she hadn’t been able to give an answer. The other team members had found it deeply amusing, but Nick said he wondered if it hadn’t been because jazz had no set melody, no beat you could follow and predict. Machines liked order, liked to run smoothly, and there was no universe in which jazz could be classed as orderly. When they switched to classical she’d had no issue, and from there they’d brought her a keyboard. Nick sat beside her, played a few bars, and wasn’t surprised when she followed suit with confident, precise fingers.

  Do you find it soothing? he’d asked, and her response had been, I like that I can make sense of it.

  I thought nothing would surprise me after he told me all that, but my phone buzzed as I buckled myself into the driver’s seat of my car parked in the lot off to the side of the mill. A Gmail chat notification. Cell service in the area was terrible, so I balanced the phone on my thigh and peeled out of the parking lot, heading back home. I punched the radio button in to shut it off and drove in silence, my thoughts fuzzy, a mental gif of Carissa’s foot jiggling playing on repeat inside my head. Would every song cause that reaction, or just some? Was it completely random? She’d had the same response to a few others, but I couldn’t find any commonalities. Nick theorized the ones she liked best had the strongest bass; by that reckoning, did that mean she’d be most partial to rap music? That would be most unlike the Carissa I’d known.

  Stopping at a red light, I finally glanced down at my phone. Messenger had loaded, displaying a little bubble with Carissa Kloss in bolded font.

  I stared down at it, my heartbeats faltering, and I might have sat there in open-mouthed shock forever if it hadn’t been for the concerto of car horns sounding off behind me. I looked up at the green light and stomped on the gas pedal, pulling off into a parking lot for a dry cleaner.

  It feels weird when we say goodbye without saying I love you, she’d said.

  Yeah. It felt really fucking weird; I’d thought that from the very first meeting.

  How can you access messenger? I typed back, fingers fumbling, pulse skyrocketing. But no three little dots appeared beside her name after the message had been marked seen, and though I waited all night and into the next day, she never responded.

  B y the time my boss mentioned it, I’d completely forgotten I was due my first ever fully paid sabbatical. My company offered each employee seven weeks’ vacation every seven years. I’d been looking forward to it back before Carissa died, imagining all the things we could do together, but I couldn’t say I was thrilled with the prospect now. I had to admit, however, that the timing was lucky, because I couldn’t test software, check for bugs, and write code without wondering how much of the same had gone into building a machine that wore Carissa’s face.

  The first day of my sabbatical, I laid in bed for much longer than usual just because I could, though it wasn’t as relaxing as I’d hoped. Especially not with a cat yowling in my face, stepping on my chest, sticking his sandpaper tongue in my ear.

  Down in the kitchen, I dumped Dexter’s Friskies onto a plate to shut him up and brewed coffee. Watching him snarf up his gravy drenched beef bits made me lose my appetite for my own breakfast. Everyone went on about how regal cats acted, but clearly they’d never been an eyewitness to one eating.

  I let him out onto the patio when his plate was licked clean, told him not to bring home any dead things, and slid onto a chair at the kitchen table to check my messages. It was an alien experience to find that I hadn’t received any work emails. I didn’t know what I’d do with myself for the next seven weeks, apart from the obvious.

  I’d returned to 311 Emery only once since my second visit with Carissa, and Nick had been in the room the entire time. I knew I should have expected as much, but the fact that he was sitting right there listening to our conversation and likely recording the whole thing to boot made it even more awkward than I’d already expected it to be. I should have told him about the Gmail message, but a part of me wondered if he didn’t already know. I’m the man behind the curtain, Dorothy; hadn’t he said that, fancied himself the all-knowing Oz? He could have prompted her. Hell, he could have written it. Anyone with the password could log in as her.

  A larger, irrational part of me had the feeling she didn’t want me to open my mouth about the message, that those probing looks from her large glass eyeballs were code for keep your trap shut. That she didn’t like being supervised by the warden any better than I did.

  It wasn’t like I could ask her.

  I knew it was a long shot, but I texted Jess and asked her to call me when she had a moment alone. It was past nine a.m.; surely she’d be awake by now. Did she and Nick live together? It seemed amazing that I didn’t even know that.

  Half an hour later while I watched an episode of Judge Judy, she called me back.

  “What’s with the cloak and dagger stuff?” she asked after my hello, sounding as though she was stifling a yawn.

  I paused the television, filling the screen with Judge Judy’s face. “Nick’s not around, is he?”

  “No. What’s up?”

  “Would it be possible for me to see her alone?”

  “You mean you in the room by yourself?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t know, Ben,” she said after a long pause. “Apart from him wanting to see how you two interact, there’s the whole safety issue.”

  “You really think she’s going to hurt me?” I hadn’t threatened her. I’d barely even touched her, and she had to know by now that I wasn’t her jailer.

  “Well I wouldn’t expect that she would, but I don’t know whether that’s a risk he’s willing to take.”

  “Did he ever explicitly tell you not to let me see her on my own?”

  Her loud exhale garbled the line with static. “Well, no, but it kind of goes without saying—”

  “Can’t you feign ignorance or something? Just once?”

  “Ben, even if I let you, it’s not like he wouldn’t be able to check the recordings later to see what went on if he suspected something. I don’t know if this is about some weird-ass conjugal visit type thing, but—”

  I balked, locking eyes with Judge Judy’s frozen face on my TV. She looked as outraged as I felt. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “How the hell am I supposed to know why it’s suddenly so important you see her alone?”

  “You’re a nutcase.” I blew out an annoyed sigh. “Do you really think I’m going to do something pervy or screw with his experiment?”

  “Well, probably not—”

  “Then can you try to let me in there alone? I wouldn’t need long.”

  She was silent so long I almost thought she’d hung up on me. “It’s going to have to be in the middle of the night, you know. He’s always there until late.”

  Well, I was on my sabbatical, right? I didn’t need to get a good night’s sleep when I didn’t have work in the morning.

  “Call me around midnight,” she finally said.

  J ess wrenched the door of 311 Emery open at half past midnight, looking about as innocent as a teenage shoplifter in Forever 21. She grabbed me by my sleeve and towed me inside, shutting the door with her hip.

  “Look distressed, or something,” she hissed, yanking out her phone. “There’s no audio on these cameras, but I want to cover my ass. I disabled notifications on his phone for the motion sensors on the cameras, so if he doesn’t call me in the next few minutes and ask what the hell I’m doing here, I think we’ll be fine.”

  “What do you want me to do, tear my hair out? Cry?”

  She shot the screen of her phone a nervous look. “I’ll settle for a lack of open excitement.” She shook her head, black curtains of hair slapping the sides of her face. “Let’s go. You need to be fast, got it?”

  I followed her short, quick strides into the hallways, feeling a million times more nervous than Jess looked. Every few feet sh
e’d toss me an annoyed look over her shoulder, and I did my best to look somewhat abashed.

  At her cubicle, she fussed with the papers and file folders blanketing her desk, keeping one eye on her phone all the while.

  “If he knows, he would have called by now, don’t you think?”

  “Probably. It’s going to be a bitch to steal his phone again and get the notifications back up in the morning. I had to do it while he was in the bathroom earlier, and even that felt like Mission Impossible.” She heaved out a great gust of air that ruffled her bangs and headed for the staircase that led to the bottom floor of the mill with me hot on her heels.

  She abruptly stopped at the first door on the left, flipping open the keypad and inputting a code with lightning fast fingers. The light flashed green. She shot me another sour look as she wrenched the door handle and pushed her way inside.

  The room was washed in semidarkness. I blinked around, letting my eyes adjust, and finally made out a shape of a denser blackness in the far corner.

  Jess kicked the door closed. “She’s charging.”

  “Does that mean she’s off?”

  “It means she’s charging.”

  I pursued Jess across the linoleum, the echoing of our shoes against the floor reminding me forcibly of my too-loud footsteps that morning I found Carissa dead.

  We stopped in front of her.

  She sat upright, as straight as if her spine was a steel rod, one arm flopping loose at her side, the other hand on one knee. Her deeply shadowed face looked gaunt and skull-like in the darkness, her eyes closed the way they’d been in her casket. A thick length of cabling snaked from the electrical outlet behind her to beneath the scrub-like shirt she wore.

  Jess touched Carissa’s arm softly, bending at the waist to examine her, her voice barely above a whisper. “I’m not sure what to do to wake her up. She goes into sleep mode after a while. She’s been programmed to do that if she’s alone and in the dark for over an hour.”