Version Control

by Dexter Palmer

  He’d brought her chicken and cheese enchiladas with green sauce. (She eyeballed the meal in its foil tin. Maybe a pound more when she stepped on the scale tomorrow morning. But still within spec. Would be nice to be taller. Amazons eat what they want.) She transferred the food to dishes so they could eat like civilized people at the kitchen table, and after he devoured the first of three soft-shell tacos in silence (not a snacker, he hadn’t eaten since noon and was starving), she said, “Any crackpots?”

  “Two crackpots. Fewer than I expected. I thought my inbox would be running over today, but: just two. One was a cease-and-desist order from some guy who claims I ‘stole his research.’ He’s been working for fifteen years on a device called the Zybourne Clock—has nine patents pending, he says. The journals are afraid to publish his work because it would mean an end to our erroneous belief in the scientific method.”

  Philip bolted down a fourth of another taco in a single indecorous mouthful. “He had a phone number on it, so Alicia handled it just for kicks. Called him up and said she was a lawyer from the firm of Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe.” He paused, gazed into the middle distance for a moment, and smiled. “There’s something beautiful about a sustained tirade from a woman with a gift for foul language. Those harsh Anglo-Saxon consonants, but her voice gave this nice lilt to it. Wouldn’t be the same from a man.” He snapped back to the present and took another big bite from the taco.

  Philip and Rebecca finished their meal in quiet communion, neither of them particularly wanting to discuss Rebecca’s endless parade of lovelorn callers or Philip’s troubles with lab management. “The second crackpot tract is in my briefcase,” he said once they were done. “Overnighted to the lab by FedEx. It’s special. It’s spectacular.”

  It was an eight-hundred-page hardcover book, bound in leather, with its pages edged in gold and a pair of red silk ribbons sewn into its spine. Rebecca opened it: English on the right-facing pages, Arabic on the left. Each page was decorated with splashes of color: columns of text wove their way between indecipherable graphs with unquantifiable measurements on their axes. “An expensive production,” Philip said. “The author comes from oil money, a dilettante intellectual. They got copies at the labs in Frascati and Perth, too.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Rebecca said.

  “It’s tacky. It turns out that I’ve been wasting my time. Because the design for the time machine,” Philip said, “is already coded in the Qu’ran. The Qu’ran is a perfect text that is directly revealed by God and therefore contains all information; however, we are flawed, imperfect people, and so the full import of its meaning will be obscured from us forever. In short, the smart bet is to start spending my grant money on religious studies.”

  Rebecca turned to an elaborate four-color diagram that portrayed the flow of time as an infinitely large tree, its branches forking into a multitude of possible worlds. Clinging tightly to several of its limbs were strange animals with reddish pelts, and the long, coiling, striped tails and wide, liquid eyes of lemurs, and the fangs and muzzles of foxes. Angels with rainbow-colored wings held hands and danced in circles at the tree’s base.

  “Once we complete the time machine, which we can do with the assistance of that book,” Philip said, “we can send a group of sentinels back in time to stand guard at important junctions in the time stream. Thereby hastening the Day of Resurrection.”

  “To give credit where it’s due, he’s ambitious.”

  “Alicia said it reminded her of when she’d tried to read the Bible as a teenager. She said it has all this best-selling hype, but once you get into it, it’s full of continuity errors and plot holes and deus ex machina. Worst novel she ever read, she said. She put it down halfway.”

  “She’s certainly funny,” Rebecca said, in the tone of voice she usually reserved for parents who insisted on boasting to her about their particularly ugly toddlers.

  “She’s good to have in the lab,” Philip said. “She’s smart and she’s good for morale. It seems weird that you have to think about morale in a laboratory—it’s not a battlefield—but you do. Happy scientists are smarter scientists.”

  “I’m sure they are,” Rebecca said, allowing herself just enough ice in her voice to satisfy herself without making Philip ask whether something was wrong, or whether she was upset.

  Later that evening, Rebecca’s father called. “When’s Philip around?” he said. “It’s time for single combat.” Single combat was Woody’s term for the conversations on religion that he insisted on having with Philip as a playful condition of Philip’s continued marriage to Rebecca. (“He came to me and asked for your hand,” he’d said. “He should have known I was going to set terms. Especially since he came to me with no dowry. Has that wastrel yet brought me a cow, or a goat? Not one cow, Rebecca. Not one goat.”) Philip, for his part, pretended exasperation, and liked to claim he only put up with Woody to humor Rebecca, but he inevitably recounted their dialogues to her after the fact like a football fan reliving the final quarters of a close game, repeating the times when he felt he’d boxed Woody into a corner, or coming up with staircase retorts to the times when Woody had stymied him. It was good, thought Rebecca, that, in their way, they got along.

  “He looked exhausted this evening,” Rebecca said. “But I’m sure that later on he’ll be happy to make the time for you.”

  “Good. I want him in top shape, so he won’t have any excuses. And what about you? How are you doing?”

  Rebecca knew the right answer here. “I’m okay. I’ve been thinking about Sean.”

  “I’ll worry when you don’t,” Woody said.

  And it was true that Rebecca had been thinking about Sean—she always did, in the back of her mind, in the same way that dull, constant pains in the joints of former athletes were ever-present reminders of decades-old injuries. But what was at the front of Rebecca’s mind at that particular moment, and had been ever since dinner, was margaritas. Really, there was nothing like the margaritas at the Mexican place where Philip had picked up the takeout. They served them out of a slushie machine, and the recipe was simple—off-the-shelf margarita mix with a corn syrup base, mixed with the kind of tequila that came in plastic bottles designed to survive the clumsiness of plastered college kids. But there was something magical about them nonetheless, the naughty concoctions served in thirty-two-ounce plastic glasses with salt-coated rims. The salt hit your tongue first, followed by the sour sweetness of the margarita with its lovely texture of finely ground ice. You didn’t even taste the tequila—you just felt a little lightheaded afterward, a little more disposed to good cheer, a little more aware of the world’s color and light, and when the twenty-two-year-old woman with the spray-on tan asked you if you wanted a second, you smiled back and said—

  “Rebecca. Have you heard a word I’ve said?”

  “Yeah! You were talking about—” She took a guess. “Emerson.”

  “Augustine.” Woody sighed. “Same number of syllables, though. Good try. That’s okay, though: Philip will pay attention to me, when I am tearing him apart in single combat. He will say: Goodness, this timid minister is giving me a most unpleasant intellectual thrashing. These Unitarians can certainly be some disputatious folk! Look: my nose is bleeding. Suddenly metaphor has become fact.”

  “I’m sure he will.”

  “Don’t tell him I’m bringing Augustine into things. I don’t want to alert him.”

  “I will be sure not to bring Saint Augustine up as a conversation topic with my husband in the near future.”

  “Good. I’ll be by to see him one evening in a few days.”

  “Okay. Love you, Dad.”

  “Love you too. Bye.”

  4

  PROXIMITY MEDALLION

  Rebecca watched bubbles of carbonation climb the inside of her glass of Pellegrino. Before her sat a half-eaten bowl of penne pasta, slathered in a congealing cream sauce: the serving that the restaurant thought proper had been large enough for three. Across the table from h
er, Kate was telling some sort of catty story about a coworker or an old boyfriend: Rebecca had lost track. The details of Kate’s rapid-fire tales started to blend together after a while, but Rebecca knew the general structures of her stories and how they tended to go. As long as she laughed at the right moments, she could zone out sometimes; moreover, she suspected that, on this particular evening, Kate expected her to be a little inattentive, and had chosen not to mind.

  Kate had texted her at nine thirty that morning, insisting on a girls’ night out right that evening, and beneath Kate’s claims that she had super-important news, Rebecca sensed Kate’s desire to give her a chance to get out of the house, away from Philip, where she’d feel obligated to talk, about Sean. Talks with Philip about Sean never went well—usually, they were more defined by the gaps between their words than the words themselves. And on this particular day of the year things were generally worse because she felt she had to talk about him, rather than merely dealing in silence with the nagging presence of his absence.

  This morning, Rebecca had woken up to hear Philip going through his usual exercise routine, the grunts that accompanied his push-up counts perhaps a bit more anguished than was ordinary. He collapsed on the forty-seventh and lay there on the floor for a minute or so, face down; then he came to his feet, stretched his arms and rolled his shoulders, and was on his way out of the bedroom when Rebecca called to him.

  It took a second or two for him to turn around.

  “I miss Sean,” Rebecca said from the bed, trying not to think that the truth of the feeling she had at that moment (and it was true, it was: how could it not be?) was somehow diminished by the compulsion she felt to perform it.

  Philip’s lip twitched. “Me, too,” he said, his voice barely audible, and before Rebecca could say anything further, he turned and left.

  Rebecca and Kate were having dinner this evening at a big-box Italian restaurant on Route 1. Its homey decor was at odds with its gigantic space: the place could seat five hundred, and the seemingly handmade one-off knickknacks tacked to the walls—thirty-year-old concert posters; rusted signs that advertised soft drinks in glass bottles—generally had exact duplicates mounted thirty yards away.

  Rebecca and Kate sat by a window; through it, Rebecca could see cars whipping down the highway with the smallest of gaps between them, the traffic brought to a relative crawl and the vehicles spacing out only when they were forced to negotiate around the rare driver who still insisted on using manual steering controls. She found it difficult to concentrate on what Kate was saying, even when she could put her thoughts about Sean and Philip in the back of her mind. The noises of families and gaggles of college kids collected in the restaurant’s cavernous ceiling, whose exposed beams were surely made of steel sheathed in paper-thin wooden paneling. At the table to Rebecca’s left were a group of women in their forties, Jersey born and bred, free from familial obligations for a night and all dolled up for each other; one of them tossed back the dregs of her appletini and loudly declared that she “still knew how to party.” On Rebecca’s other side was a table of four: a mother and father, a screaming toddler in a high chair, and a four-year-old whose parents had given up on trying to get him to stay in his seat. He wore a large plastic medallion around his neck with an LCD display that featured a minimalist representation of a smiling bear’s face; the necklace appeared to be some kind of proximity detector meant to reassure multitasking guardians. Whenever the child climbed out of his chair and wandered away from the table (the father fiddling with his phone; the mother dutifully trying to slide spoonfuls of risotto between the baby’s defiantly pursed lips), the bear’s face lost its grin; if the boy got more than fifteen feet away, a three-note chime sounded and the device sang, in an infuriatingly earwormy way, “It’s time to come back to Mommy and Daddy. Mommy and Daddy are too far away! Come back, come back to Mommy and Daddy: this is where you should stay.” Clearly the child liked the tune, and wanted to hear it as many times as he possibly could. He would cartoonishly tiptoe one step away from his parents, then another, and then, very slowly, another: then when he finally took the step that tripped the proximity alarm he’d clap and giggle.

  “What do you think would happen if the kid actually left the restaurant?” Kate said after she and Rebecca had suffered through the jingle for the ninth time. “I bet that thing around his neck would start playing Metallica and pop him with five hundred volts.”

  Rebecca clapped her hand over her mouth to stifle a snigger.

  “Yeah,” Kate continued, “and then when he was writhing around on the ground with his eyes rolled back and foam coming out of his mouth it’d say: Justice is done!”

  “So you said you had some super-important news?” Rebecca said as Kate tapped the touchscreen implanted in the middle of the table, ordering a cup of coffee for herself and another little bottle of Pellegrino for Rebecca. The touchscreen displayed an animation of a waiter with slicked-back black hair and a pencil mustache scurrying off to a kitchen, leaving tracks and smoke in his wake; then it resumed its display of a series of images of vaguely Italian-American subjects: a movie poster advertising The Godfather Part II; the album art for Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours; a red-checkered gingham tablecloth rippling in a light wind.

  “Well,” said Kate, “you’re not going to believe this. But I’ve been hanging out with Carson again. After your party, we got in touch—I got in touch with him—and we talked a bit—e-mailing and IMing, mostly—and we hung out a couple of times.”

  “Hung out?”

  “You know: hung out, hung out. I guess we hooked up once.”

  “Hooked up?”

  “Hooked up, hooked up. I ended up staying over the other night.”

  Rebecca rested her chin on a hand propped up by an elbow. “Staying over?”

  “Ha fucking ha, Becca.”

  “Ah, that’s the word you were looking for.”

  “You’re impossible.”

  “It was you who decided to break it off with him the first time, right?” Rebecca said as a harried server dropped off their drinks. (The server quickly reached over Kate’s shoulder to tap the touchscreen in the middle of the table as if he were tagging the next runner in a relay race, and the cartoonish Italian waiter appeared with a comic-book-style speech bubble over his head that read, “96 seconds! That’s-a A-OK!” The server left the table without a word, heading back to the kitchen at a jog.)

  “Yeah, the first time,” Kate said.

  “I doubt he’s going to change whatever convinced you to call things off before, just because you lured him back into your arms with your feminine wiles. Irresistible as they may be.”

  Kate sighed. “See,” she said, “there’s the thing. I didn’t really dump him because he was slow getting back to me when I sent him a text, or because he always seemed distracted when he was around me, thinking of his work instead. I think that was just something I told myself. It’s certainly what I told everyone else. Even though it sounded kind of, I guess, flighty.”

  “So why’d you dump him, then?”

  “You’re going to think I’m awful.”

  “Probably.”

  “No, seriously!”

  “Okay.” Rebecca lost her playful smirk. “Tell me what happened.”

  Kate took a breath. “Well, I’ll just say it. When we were first going out, I was really into him! He wasn’t the kind of guy who usually answers my profile—he could write in complete sentences, for one thing.”

  “Which is rare,” Rebecca said. “I look at these profiles, and I see so many people do so many terrible things to English.”

  “Yeah! And when I met him, he was weird, a little, sure, but nice! I mean, kind. And how many times had I gone out with a guy a couple of times to find out that he was all peaches-and-cream online, but a total asshole in real life. So there was that. And he was successful, too—honestly, when you say to people, Oh, by the way, did I mention, I’m dating a scientist, it sounds pretty badass. Not like
, I’m dating a mattress salesman, or something like that.

  “So I was really into him, but—and I feel bad about this—in the back of my head, the whole time, once I started to feel kind of serious about him, I was thinking: How am I going to bring this guy home to my parents?”

  Rebecca put down her glass of sparkling water and looked across the table. “Kate. Seriously.”

  “I know, right? And it wasn’t like I would even have to! My mom died three years ago and my dad is in a home! And this is the twenty-first century: we basically live in the future. But it was just the idea of it, in my head. The idea of my parents. I thought about them and it was like I went back in time. And it was like they were still sitting at this dinner table, both of them, waiting to judge. And I just…” She let the sentence trail off and protectively drew her arms across her chest, her nails digging into the palms of her hands. “You know. You know you’re thinking something stupid, and you know it’s stupid, but it doesn’t stop you from thinking it anyway.”

  A server holding another tray of fruit-laced martinis for the increasingly raucous women on their girls’ night out deftly avoided the hyperactive four-year-old, who was now running up and down the aisle as the medallion around his neck continued to sing.

  “Have you told him any of this?” Rebecca asked.

  “Oh hell no.”

  “Do you think he’s guessed?”

  Kate thought about it. “Honestly: probably not. It’s not the kind of thing he would think about. Head full of science and all.”

  “Well, it might not be a problem, then,” Rebecca said. “I mean: you look at it one way and yeah, okay, it’s a problem. But look at it like this—you were into this guy. You had a conversation with yourself about him, and you made a bad decision. Now you have a second chance. That conversation with yourself happened entirely in your head, right? Well, you told me about it, but what you tell me goes in the vault and stays there.” She pinched her thumb and index finger together and ran them quickly across her lips. “So it might as well not have happened. So just let it go and stop beating yourself up about it. Easy.”