Version Control

by Dexter Palmer

  “Hnnn-nn: Forty…five—” The breath went out of him as he dropped to the floor wheezing.

  Rebecca had figured that there must be a good reason that Philip put himself through this. (Strength training was not her choice: she’d never been fond of the idea of doing crunches or lifting hunks of iron until pain and fatigue got the better of you. Philip had tried to tell her that that post-workout ache was a “good ache,” but that couldn’t be a clearer example of an oxymoron.)

  Perhaps Philip was just not interested in becoming stronger; perhaps it was not the exercise itself that mattered to him, but the experience of it. Maybe he wanted to set the tone of each morning by always trying, and always failing, the consequent band of pain across his chest serving as a reminder of that failure to carry him through the day.

  Still breathing heavily, Philip clambered to his feet and shuffled out of the bedroom, wincing and shrugging his shoulders.

  As Rebecca drifted in and out of a light doze, she heard the usual series of sounds of Philip getting ready for work: the hiss of the showerhead; the thunk of the refrigerator door shutting; the voice of an NPR newscaster muted to a tranquil murmur even as she related details of the most horrific events. Rebecca remembered the other morning noises that, a few years earlier, would have provided a counterpoint to Philip’s: the clink of a spoon as she deposited it in their boy’s cereal bowl; her gentle but continuous harangue as she coaxed him into dressing and tried to teach him to match his shirt and pants. But sometimes an incipient tantrum she had no time for meant that checks and stripes were the order of the day. “Have fun at the circus,” she’d say to Sean’s back as he ran out the door to catch the bus.

  Rebecca also remembered mimosas. This is how you make mimosas. You put the bottle of Prosecco in the back of the refrigerator the night before, after your husband and your son are asleep. You aren’t hiding it, exactly—it’s just that the back of the fridge gets colder than the front, and in the morning you want the bottle to be nice and chilled, right? After the house is empty the next morning, you uncork the bottle and pour Prosecco into a wine glass until it’s two-thirds full. Then you fill it almost to the rim with orange juice. Then, yes, you take the first sip, yes, and that cold tart effervescence never fails to shock your tongue, the sweet citrus flavor chasing just behind to soothe it. Prosecco goes flat quickly; best to kill the bottle by afternoon—

  She heard the front door shut, sat up in bed, and sighed. Cornflakes and black coffee for breakfast. Then work.

  A person who saw Philip entering his non-autonomous car at his home each morning and getting out of it at his lab twenty-five minutes later might think that he’d perhaps been replaced by an actor, one who’d been hired to play the part of Philip based on his resemblance to the man and not his talent. It seemed as if on his way over to the laboratory that the set of his jaw changed ever so slightly, that the blue of his eyes changed from water to ice.

  The transformation was not entirely unconscious; at times Philip was not even sure that it was necessary, though by now it had become a habit that, like his morning push-ups, he could not do without. He did not feel that he had to become a different person in the lab (and in fact, the experience of watching himself on television last night, of seeing himself perform himself, had discomforted him even more than he had expected). He merely thought that the proper discharge of his duties required that certain aspects of his personality had to be brought to the forefront, while others were temporarily suppressed.

  It was perfectly natural. Humans are always transforming, even when sitting still. At a family gathering a few years ago Rebecca’s mother, Marianne, had told Philip, as if it were fact, that all of the atoms in a human body replaced themselves every seven years, and that this was clear evidence for a constancy of consciousness that was so near to the idea of a soul that it might as well be called by the name. Under Rebecca’s glare, Philip had managed to refrain from mentioning radiocarbon studies that had demonstrated the persistence of the material that made up tooth enamel: he sometimes forgot that what he saw as simple truth others viewed as pedantry. But to be fair, aside from her needlessly theological conclusion, Marianne had been more right than wrong: inside of a year, almost all of the stuff of which you were made got regularly switched out for other stuff as you ate and drank and breathed, and yet if you said you had the same identity you did a year ago, no one would think to call you a liar. Being is always becoming; people change and stay the same. What is true for bodies is also true for selves: even the most honest person has many faces, none of which are false.

  The fact that Philip Steiner loved Rebecca as much as he loved doing science was an indication of the depth of his devotion to her, not of its absence (even if declarations of his affection went unspoken more often than they might have; even if the science never fully left his mind). But if those twin loves were equal in degree, they were greatly different in kind and in the nature of their demands. The face with which Philip looked upon his wife was not one he could present to the beautiful device that occupied his days: it wanted a colder gaze.

  By the time he arrived at the lab he had changed from Philip to Philip. Processor cycles that, at other times, were dedicated to parsing Rebecca’s mood, or mentally replaying Rush’s song “Fly by Night,” or imagining possible lives for the absent boy in timelines other than this, were retasked to a single purpose. When he passed through the door he was ready to give all of his attention to the machine, and for it to favor him in return with its unending stream of maddening, wonderful questions.

  Her breakfast finished, Rebecca was now on the treadmill, its pace set to a walk; she wore a T-shirt and loosely fitting gym shorts, with monitor shades on her face, a headset stuck in her ear, and a single-hand keyboard strapped to her left forearm. All of this gear communicated wirelessly with the desktop computer in the next room: maybe it would’ve been more practical just to be in the room with it instead of on the treadmill, but if she spent her whole day sitting there she’d just get fatter. As it was, a slight extra roll of flesh still crept over the band of her shorts, but a few pounds picked up ounce by ounce over a couple of decades were nothing more than evidence of a life lived well. For those women without golden genes, the choice as you headed toward forty was either this or that tough, stringy look that came from twice-daily ninety-minute gym sessions, followed by meals of rice cakes garnished with kale leaves. Like Alicia Merrill. Philip’s post-doc. She’d be like that not long from now. Always with the running, and the yoga, and the water, and those awful insect bars. Carrying around a stainless-steel water bottle with her all the time, telling you she needed to stay hydrated. When you get to this age your body becomes your history. You could look at her and see she’d had a joyless life.

  It had not taken long for Rebecca to learn how to operate the sixteen-key keyboard and the thumb-powered nubbin that pushed the cursor across the screens of her monitor shades—she could handle the controls while moving at a slow walk, not so fast that she might get winded while on the phone. Rebecca worked part-time as a customer service representative for Lovability, the online dating service where, eleven years ago, she’d actually met the man who was now her husband (and where Kate had first met Carson, come to think of it). The people who called her were generally in deep and barely disguised distress, their complaints about double-billed charges and dropped connections serving as proxies for other, deeper grievances. It was not unusual for Rebecca to find herself dragged into an interminable conversation about the fickleness of the human heart, or on the receiving end of a rant that sounded as if it had been lifted from a Jacobean revenge play. It would not do, in the midst of one of these conversations, to have to catch her breath. Hence the slow walk, better than sitting still.

  The first call came in three minutes after she logged on, a thirty-nine-year-old divorcé on the Silver Plan (which guaranteed priority customer service: she’d have to turn on the charm, since her electronic masters might be listening, measuring the pitch of h
er voice for the modulations that indicated the appearance of pleasure in conversation. Flat affects earned red flags on your record; too many and a supervisor told you you were done for the day).

  “Lova-bil-ity, this is Re-bec-ca,” she sang, then dropped into a purr that came from the back of the throat and seemed to promise special unmentionable services for Silver Plan customers: “How can I help you?”

  “Hello!” the customer screamed, and Rebecca dialed down the volume of her headset. His profile came up on her shades, blurry at first, but snapping into clear 3D as she tapped a temple and settled them on her nose. PhilPhilliesFan1984. There was half the problem right there: profile name too long and confusing; gave away his age right off the bat. His photo hovered next to his vital stats. Class-B health care from his employer. He could get a wife with that alone if his standards weren’t too crazy, a pretty woman in her thirties with asthma or scoliosis, some kind of flaw you’d never really notice.

  “I have a problem!” PhilPhilliesFan1984 said.

  “Just a moment while I pull up your file,” Rebecca said, buying more time. His photo was horrible. A lot of people with profiles on Lovability hired professional photographers, who spent three hours in Photoshop for every one behind the camera. But this guy was using some candid photo from a wedding reception, with a heavily pixelated toupee added to his pate. Poor bastard might have even ’shopped it himself, unskilled and unaware.

  His profile message was entirely in capital letters. Screaming online just like he screamed on the phone. At least it was accurate.

  “GOOD CATCH”!

  I AM A “GOOD CATCH”. I AM A KIND AND LOVING MAN WHO MADE SOME BAD DECISIONS WHEN I WAS YOUNGER. BUT NOW I AM READY TO MEET THE “LOVE OF MY LIFE”! OTHER THAN MY BABY GIRL, HEHE. SHE JUST STARTED SIXTH GRADE SO SHE IS NOT SUCH A BABY GIRL ANYMORE, HEHE! SHE LIVES WITH HER MOM MOST OF THE TIME BUT SHE IS STILL THE “APPLE OF MY EYE”.

  I LIKE BASEBALL (GO PHILS!!) AND MOVIES FROM “BACK IN THE DAY” (ARNOLD!!) AND HANGING OUT WITH MY DOG RUDY (HE IS A “MUTT” FROM A SHELTER.) AND I LIKE JUST KICKING BACK WITH SOME BEERS OR EVEN A BOTTLE OF WINE. I HAVE BEEN EMPLOYED AT THE SAME PLACE FOR THIRTEEN YEARS, AND I AM A GOOD PROVIDER.

  I AM LOOKING FOR A WOMAN WITH NO “BAGGAGE” WHO LIKES TO BE TAKEN CARE OF (BUT NO “GOLDDIGGERS” LOL!) IF YOU WANT TO MEET RUDY AND MY BABY GIRL, SEND ME A SMILE! P.S. PLEASE, NO “NEGRESSES”. I AM NOT A RACIST BUT I CANNOT HELP THE WAY MY HEART THINKS.

  Hm.

  “I have a problem!” PhilPhilliesFan1984 reminded Rebecca.

  “Okay,” she said, opting for perkiness rather than seduction. “I’ve got your profile up. How can I help you?”

  “I am on the Silver Plan. And this lets me give out one hundred Smiles, and get back a hundred and fifty Smiles.”

  “That’s the monthly allowance on the Silver Plan, yes.”

  “And this month I have given out all one hundred of my Smiles!”

  Quickly, moving her thumb on the keyboard’s nubbin, Rebecca pulled up a trend analysis of his clickthroughs on other profiles. Several graphs sprang into view, with dozens of images of women floating behind them in illusory three-dimensional space. As she expected, there was a huge discrepancy between the profile of the kind of woman he declared he’d most like to meet (between ages thirty and forty; Christian or “spiritual but not religious”; looking for new friends) and the average profile he was actually likely to spend time viewing and messaging. Not one of the women he’d checked out for more than thirty seconds was older than twenty-three. Pinched kissyfaces; midriffs sporting pierced navels; bolt-on boobs tumbling out of tank tops. Webcam bait. Half the profiles were probably fake.

  “I gave out all one hundred Smiles this month, and I only got back one, from someone I didn’t even send one to! And she had something wrong with her head, it looked like. Not mentally, but the shape of it! That doesn’t seem right. Is there something wrong with the way my account is set up?” She could hear the hope in his voice.

  This would be tricky. “Well, I’m looking here at your profile, and first off, I have to congratulate you on your taste. You are going after a lot of gorgeous women here.”

  “I like to think I’ve learned how to pick ’em,” PhilPhilliesFan1984 said.

  “If you’re going to step up to bat, you might as well swing for the fences, right?” She followed the baseball metaphor with a conspiratorial chuckle.

  “You got it! You got it. Man, I tell you. Women get that. Men don’t always get that.”

  “But see, the thing is, women at this level are going to have about a hundred guys coming after them too, right? And sure, half of them are losers, but these ladies log on and open up their Smilebags and see a hundred Smiles in there, and chances are against you even getting a clickthrough to your profile in the first place. A lot of these women will look at all those Smiles and just give up and not click on any of them at all, much less send a Smile back.”

  “That has got to be the problem.”

  Surely.

  “It’s the kind of stuff you learn when you’ve got the God’s-eye view of the whole thing,” Rebecca said. “I mean, and I’m not really supposed to talk to customers on this personal level, but I’m looking at your profile right now, and you are a good catch.” She flinched as soon as she said it. Too much, too soon?

  “Well, I like to think I am! Thank you. You are really nice. Just really nice.”

  Perfect.

  “What’s your name again?”

  “Rebecca.”

  “Rebecca,” he repeated.

  “I’m thinking,” she said. “Thinking about how I can maybe help you out here.”

  She paused for a beat.

  “Give me a chance to pull something up.”

  Another beat.

  “Hmm. This isn’t going to—well, it might. Have you ever considered the Gold Plan?”

  “The Gold Plan?” He sounded a little suspicious, but not too much. Easy to recover.

  “See, here’s the thing. It’s not just that with the Gold Plan you can send out two hundred Smiles and receive three hundred, but when a Smile from a Gold Plan customer appears in a Smilebag? First, it’s got a little gold star next to it, and second, it shows up at the very top of the queue, instead of being buried in the middle somewhere where no one will see it. And see, we had this offer that just expired where Silver Plan customers could get a free trial month of the Gold Plan to see if they liked it. Which would have been perfect for you. But I’m thinking…let me see if I can get in touch with my friend Lindy in Accounts. Maybe I can have her set you up as a last-minute thing.”

  Absolute delight. “That would be excellent. That would be just fine.”

  “I got Lindy and her fiancé a pair of Phillies versus Mets tickets for her birthday, so she owes me one.” Gilding the lily, maybe, but why not.

  “You are a fantastic lady,” PhilPhilliesFan1984 said.

  “Okay…okay. I just IMed Lindy and got the go-ahead. So I’ll just change you over to the Gold Plan myself. Your account should refresh in a few minutes, and you’ll see the updated allowances and additional privileges.” This was not a man who read license agreements, Rebecca thought. He might not even notice the eventual steep increase of the automatic monthly charge to his credit card; he might not even be able to follow the elaborate procedure necessary to cancel the upgrade after that first trial month (which involved finding a light gray link displayed against the white background of your profile page before you could even begin). No need to mention any of that.

  “You seem like a really nice person,” PhilPhilliesFan1984 said.

  Uh-oh.

  She drained all the music out of her voice; by now the modulation monitors wouldn’t care. “Can I help you with anything else?”

  Silence on his end, then a cleared throat. Oh no. Here it comes.

  “This may seem inappropriate to you,” PhilPhilliesFan1984 said. “And maybe kind of sudden. But this is how good things happen, right? Suddenly! And I
can tell just from your voice that you are a great person. And I was wondering if we could talk again. Just about baseball, with a fellow Phils fan, or whatever—”

  One last delicious lie: “I’m black,” she said, and disconnected.

  A few minutes later she received an automatically generated e-mail congratulating her on her twentieth upsell to the Gold Plan this month. It came with the usual gift certificate that could be cashed in at any of the pseudo-ethnic chain restaurants that lined both sides of Route 1, huge as warehouses and filled with families that had screaming toddlers in tow.

  She’d give the certificate to Kate, like she often did. Maybe the two of them could have a girls’ night out: it’d be good to be distracted for a bit, to have a reason not to think of the way her husband’s personality had lost some of its shine as he’d grown older, or the late-afternoon silence that screamed the news of Sean’s absence, or the troubling memories that still sprang on her from the empty house’s shadows.

  3

  CRACKPOT THEORIES

  After Rebecca knocked off her shift at Lovability (the final tally: three customers upsold from Silver to Gold; two more from Bronze to Silver), she watched TV for a while, flipping idly between three different channels that were all showing reruns of hour-long crime shows, featuring coroners performing autopsies in dimly lit morgues who then traded their lab coats for bulletproof vests in order to go out on stakeouts. Philip came home earlier than expected—eight thirty—with a bag of Mexican takeout for the both of them, which he’d forgotten to inform her about by phone beforehand. She chose to read the meal as a silent apology for his anger of the night before, and so she quickly slipped back into the kitchen where pasta was on the boil, shut off the heat, and tossed the half-cooked spaghetti into the compost, collateral damage from a harmless marital miscommunication.