Darcy and Paul had been familiar for a couple of months, and the Chapel had become their usual meeting place. Things usually ended up at one or the other’s apartment, and this was usually Darcy’s since Paul’s apartment was decidedly a bachelor pad and not as comfortable or welcoming as hers.
Paul walked into The Chapel already feeling uncomfortable, but he tried to put his feelings away. He saw Darcy and went to the table where she was sitting.
“Hi,” he said. “How are you?”
“Good,” she said. “How about you?”
He sighed through his nose. “I don’t really want to talk about it.”
She recoiled a little at his brusqueness, but smiled and said, “Okay.”
A waitress came to their table and they ordered drinks—she a Manhattan, he a Hefeweizen.
After the waitress left, there was a moment’s silence between them. Darcy tapped on the table with her fingers.
“Well, if you do want to talk about it, it’s okay,” she said, smirking a little at him.
“I don’t.”
“Well, all right, but we should probably find something else to talk about. Unless you want to just sit there and be silent about it the whole time.”
He shook his head. “Well, how was your day? What did you do?”
“Well,” she said, “thanks for asking. I worked. Not very exciting. We have people come in just to read the books. They never buy any of them—they never buy anything—they just come in to read. Some of these people who come in to read are pretty… ‘special.’ I’m not sure what to do about them. I asked Laura, my co-manager, about it, and she left it up to me. I don’t know. It’s probably bad for business, and it’s not really what our shop is for, but I feel bad for them, you know? They’re like kids, some of them. Big, smelly kids, but still just kids. They don’t steal anything. But they smell bad, and I’m sure the books get a little wear from the use… I don’t know. It’s not like we get many customers nowadays. Printed books are so old-fashioned now. And I know that lots of the people who do buy the books will never read them—they’re just gifts for somebody, or they’re to look nice on their coffee table. Pretty ironic. The people who buy the books never read them, and the people who read the books never buy them.”
Their drinks arrived. Darcy lifted the glass and put it to her lips. Even sipping the glass, her mouth turned up a little at the corners like she was still smiling.
Paul had been waiting for the head on his beer to recede. Now that it had, he took a drink, and then said, “Language is going to be old-fashioned soon.”
She laughed a little and said, “What?”
“I’m serious,” he said, looking deep into his glass. “What do we use words for? Communication, right? Communication of ideas? There’s research being done right now to codify those ideas digitally. I just read an article where some scientists created an image from a man’s dream—they placed terminals on his head and generated an image based on the brainwaves he was producing while he was asleep. So not much longer now and you will be able to visualize something and have it show up on a screen—or, instead of a screen, if the other end of the terminals were connected to another person’s brain, then you could literally ‘show’ the other person what you were thinking without having to describe it using words. Words are just an intermediary. It may become possible to codify abstract ideas digitally like this and then record them, so instead of books, people may be able to connect their brains to diodes and instantaneously experience the transfer of a complex idea without the originator having to formulate it in words, or the recipient to decodify it and reconstruct it through language. Books will become even more obsolete than they already are, maybe even language itself. I mean, what if we were eventually able to do all of this wirelessly?”
“Shit, man, that’s way over my head,” Darcy said, smiling again. “What if something pops into my head that I don’t want anyone to see? Yikes. I think words are a useful intermediary because it gives you a second to think before whatever it is just comes out. Besides, I have to write to think.”
“You what?”
“No, I’m serious. It helps me to sit down and write. I make lists.” She added ominously, “Lots of lists,” smirked, and then continued, “If I’m feeling a certain way or something weird has just happened to me, I sit down and write and process what I’m going through. I mean, I guess maybe I ‘know’ everything in my head already, but it’s almost like I don’t. It’s like until I write it out I’m just confused. But when I write it all out, I figure it out.”
“You’re weird,” he said.
“You’re weird,” she returned, “talking about hooking up people’s brains to diodes so that we don’t have to have conversations. If that were true, you would never have the chance hear my beautiful voice. Besides, I don’t think that would catch on. People like words. Shakespeare, you know?”
“I hate Shakespeare.”
“Yeah, I bet you do, but lots of people just get a kick out of saying shit like, ‘What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty!’ People pay money to just listen to that. They’re absolutely tickled by it.”
“I never understood any of that.”
“Well, yeah. It was that stuff that got me into acting. Hamlet, especially. I always wanted to be Hamlet. Even though I’m a girl. I always thought, hey, men played women in Shakespeare’s day, maybe I could be in an all-woman Shakespeare troupe. Or maybe just play Hamlet, and not even make it a thing, really. The best fucking Hamlet ever, man or woman.”
“You gotta follow your dream, I guess,” Paul said, taking a drink.
“I guess so,” she said. She drained the last of her Manhattan just as the waitress was making a pass by their table.
“Do you want another?” the waitress asked.
“Yes,” Darcy said emphatically.
Paul took another sip. He was not halfway through his.
The waitress gone, Darcy said, “So what’s your dream anyway? Are you living the dream, what you do, or is there something ‘out there’ that you still think about?”
Paul spun his glass on the table. The coaster was stuck to the bottom with moisture and clung to the bottom of the glass, spinning with it.
“I am doing what I’m passionate about, I guess.”
“You’re passionate about ending aging.”
“I’m passionate about life. Minimizing suffering, extending lifespan… that’s what I see as… most connected to what I’m all about.” He continued twirling his glass. He wondered vaguely if he could spin the glass fast enough that the coaster would break free.
“But, I mean, is the work fun for you? Doing research or… or giving talks?”
“Look, I said I didn’t want to talk about it,” he said, still spinning his glass. A little bit of his drink spilled out of it. He stopped the glass abruptly and lifted it and took a drink, the coaster still stuck to the bottom.
“Talk about what?”
“Talk about work. It was, well, kind of a rough day I guess, and I want to have fun, not talk about a rough day at work.” He set the glass firmly back down.
“Well, okay,” she said.
He started spinning the glass again, slowly. “I mean, don’t you agree that life is valuable? Who doesn’t agree with that?”
“Well, certainly, of course human life is valuable.”
“Exactly. And the greatest good then is to make that life as good as possible for as long as possible. Maximum goodness.”
“Sure.”
“I mean, don’t you agree?”
“Well, sure, but I don’t know if I’d want to live forever.” She was looking off to the side, studying the peaked orange glass windows. “It just seems like it would get old. I don’t really want to be around forever. I don’t know who would want me around forever. I guess I don’t really know of anybody else, either, who would especially benefit the human race that much.”
“You’re saying no one deserves to live fore
ver.”
“Maybe. What do people deserve?”
“I think people are basically good. People have a right to happiness.”
“Sure, but people are also fucked up.” Her eyes roamed around the room. “I don’t know. It just seems to me like we have so many problems, living forever won’t really solve anything.”
“What do you mean? Why not? Do you mean you would rather die?”
She turned back to the table, looking down at it. “Well, I mean, if your goal is the elimination of suffering… I don’t know.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I don’t know! Wouldn’t it all get old after a while?”
“Well, then, that would just mean you’re not doing it right.”
She straightened up and broadened her shoulders, and a smile played on her face again. “I mean, what if somebody could, you know, never make it work romantically, even if they lived a very long time, and they were just tired, you know? Tired of things never working out. And that’s not even the worst thing that a person can go through. In any case, isn’t death the end of suffering?”
“Death is suffering. It’s the chief form of suffering that there is!”
The smile disappeared and her face grew dark and serious, more serious than he had ever seen before.
“No,” she said, “it’s not. After you’re dead, you don’t feel anything.”
Paul stopped for a moment and spun his glass at a regular tempo. “So you’re okay with death?”
“What do you mean okay with death?”
“So you’d be okay dying, say, tomorrow?”
She twisted her mouth to the side and sat back. “I guess I hadn’t thought about it.”
“Yeah, you see, no one ever does. Not unless they’re old and death is at their doorstep, as they say. But it’s coming, it’s coming for you, and me, and it will be here sooner than we think, and the only thing that we can do is to help ourselves—to live longer, to live better.”
He was impressed with himself. He had half a mind to write it down for his talk the next week.
“Unless, of course,” he added, “you’d rather be dead.”
She was disinterested again. “It would be an end to suffering. Or at least an end to this fucking conversation.”
“Answer me seriously. Aren’t you afraid of death?”
She turned to him darkly again, her eyes flickering. “Well, I’m not afraid of Hell. Are you?”
“Hell?” He straightened, taken aback. “What does that have to do with anything?”
She erupted, speaking quickly in a tumble of words. “Because that’s the only reason anyone would be afraid of death. Either there’s nothing, or you go to Heaven, or you go to Hell. If it’s nothing or you go to Heaven, you have nothing to worry about. So you must be afraid of Hell.”
He froze, staring at her. Then he looked down and away. “You know what?” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. “Let’s try this again some other night when we’re in a better mood.”
Darcy looked at him incredulously.
Paul dropped a ten on the table, stood, slipped his wallet back into his pocket, and walked out. The heavy door swung shut behind him.
At that moment, the waitress returned with Darcy’s second martini and said, “Sorry for the delay. There you go.”
Darcy looked down into the drink, taking special note of its hue, its smell, and the way it was still rocking gently from the waitress’s motion as she had set it down. Had she seen the bill on the table? Perhaps she had ignored it, not wanting to be awkward.
Thanks for that, thought Darcy.
Without another thought, she slugged the drink, dropped some more money on the table without really counting it, and left, plunging into the night outside the heavy door.
In an effort to clear her head, Darcy walked along in the familiar world of the city at night—streets upon streets of bars and pubs, venues and restaurants. She was unsettled, and she felt that she wanted to be away from herself, even though she knew that was not really possible. But the city and the city air and the city sights and sounds and smells had begun to distract her already, and she was thankful.
The city was life. It coursed with movement and light and sound. It seemed to never stop, and its constancy was reassuring. It repeated the same themes in a thousand different iterations of food, drink, and music. It was singularly diverse, and diverse in its singularity. It connected people to people; it was a hub of hubs. World-class food was made and tasted here, life-altering conversations were had here, historical progress initiated and enacted here—in the city.
But in the midst of this life was also death. Whatever preyed on people found its greatest promise here. The homeless wandered the sidewalks with vacant eyes, minds contracted and singularly bent toward what purposes had commandeered their lives. Others besides the homeless were dead too, looking without sight, speaking without meaning, drowning their thoughts in Lethean half-death measured out in shots, pints, and pours. They were alive, but not fully living, they were awake but not fully present. It was as though at any moment they might be awakened, and they kept themselves from it by distraction. The light, the sound, the music, the drink—all were distractions from something seen only on the edge of vision, if at all, and once glimpsed, looked away from hastily, the gaze shifted to whatever it could find next—and there was always more light, sound, music, or drink. Darcy had glimpsed it tonight, and the city was there for her—the city with all its life was there to catch her in arms of asphalt, grime, light, and color.
Just seeing it and breathing it in was enough, and Darcy walked quickly back to her apartment. The night air pouring into her lungs always seemed to remind her of her aloneness, her solitude, despite the bustle of the city, and it was a good reminder. She was alone—so she went to go be alone.
#
The next morning, Paul arrived at work early after a night of fitful sleep. He always slept poorly when something was bothering him, although this time he couldn’t pinpoint what that something was. It wasn’t his conversation with Darcy; he had had arguments with girls before. It wasn’t his conversation with Mr. Randolph; he had been rejected before. He decided to take advantage of his restlessness and went into work early to channel his energy into working on his presentation.
After an hour or so of work, the lab technicians under his employ began to trickle in and pick up with their work. He had not made much progress, and after working for another hour or so, he gave up and went into the lab.
After working with them in the lab them for some time, his phone rang in his office. He went in, and answering the phone, he found that it was Eric.
“Hey, Paul, would you be able to talk at some point this afternoon?”
“I can talk right now.”
“Okay. Well, it’s something I’d rather discuss with you face to face, not over the phone. Are you available? You want me to come up there?”
“No, no, I’ll come down. I’ll be there in a minute.”
Paul went downstairs. Eric’s lab was constructed just like Paul’s, with a large working area and an enclosed, windowed office adjoining it. The atmosphere in Eric’s office was more upbeat than usual, and instead of working, Eric’s technicians were sitting back against the tables, talking and laughing with each other. No work was being done.
Eric was with them, and upon seeing Paul, he motioned for him to follow him into his office.
“What’s up?” Paul asked as Eric shut the door behind them.
“Well, we’ve had a pretty significant breakthrough. I don’t want to bore you with the details—I know you have work to do—but we’ve just had some of our work endorsed by the National Neuroscience Association. Also, since the rabbit brain recovery, we’ve actually been able to apply for a grant that we were hoping to get, and it’s looking like a pretty sure thing.”
Paul began, “Congratulations—”
Eric held up his hand and continued. “So, the good news
is that we’re getting more money. The reason I called you is that there’s good news for you too: part of our next steps involves some of the work you’ve been doing on the brain. I will be able to siphon off some of the money we’re getting for our work and send it your way, since we’re going to need to piggyback on you for what we’re doing next.”
To Paul’s own surprise, he was not happy at this news. He was not sure why, but he feigned happiness and relief, saying, “Wow! That’s fantastic news. Thanks for letting me know.” He faltered for a moment, and then added, “So you have the publication coming out soon?”
“Yeah, sure, you can have all the material if you want. I made copies for you.”
“Okay, great.”
The sinking feeling of disappointment persisted, and Paul was still not sure why he felt it. He followed Eric to the corner of his office where he had a crate full of files and accepted them when Eric handed him the box. The box was heavy, and attempting to appear as though he were not really exerting himself, Paul carried the box out of the office.
Back in his own office, Paul set the box to the side of his desk, on the floor. He reemerged to tell his team the good news. They seemed genuinely pleased at it, and this helped to lift his spirits a little. When he went back in his office and closed the door, he no longer felt as downcast as he had earlier, although he was still not as happy as he felt he should be. He sat down at his desk and put the box of files out of his mind, attempting to focus once more on his writing, which had gone terribly all morning.
The Imminent Scourge Page 2
