Version Control

by Dexter Palmer

  “All of it. I eat all of the food.”

  “I’m an excellent cook. Name something, and I’ll prepare it for you.”

  “That’s a bold offer, Philip.”

  “Yes.”

  “Shaving cream.”

  “Things are going well between us: I’d rather not injure you.”

  “Panda.”

  “Nor would I prefer to break the law. I may have exaggerated slightly in my offer.”

  She made a show of sighing. “Okay. Salmon.”

  He nodded. “Salmon is perfectly fine. When?”

  “Wednesday?”

  “Perfect. Come by my place then: seven thirty.”

  “Will do. Looking forward to it.”

  On their way out of the garden Rebecca and Philip passed a final Seward Johnson sculpture, a three-dimensional, life-size copy of the photo that one guy took at the end of World War II, the one with that sailor smooching a surprised nurse in the middle of Times Square. “Unconditional Surrender,” its plaque read.

  On their second date, Rebecca went over to Philip’s apartment for dinner, a cozy two-bedroom place in a faculty complex whose rent was subsidized by Stratton University. Picking salmon turned out to be a good call, because Philip’s cooking was about as good as his drumming: serviceable, but perhaps not as good as he thought it was. And salmon is a dish that’s hard to screw up unless you have malicious intent. To his credit, he’d opted for ease and simplicity: in the kitchen’s recycling bin, she saw the empty jar that had once held ready-made bruschetta topping, but said nothing.

  She’d brought wine along, a liter bottle of Grüner, and after two glasses to his half of one she said, pouring herself yet another glass in what she considered to be the most obvious of hints, “I’m a little too tipsy to drive right now. Can we just hang out for a bit?” “I have a collection of classic films we could watch,” Philip replied, and they repaired to his living room, where he pointed out his floor-to-ceiling shelves of DVDs and Blu-rays. His collection was composed almost entirely of science fiction and fantasy movies: you’d look in vain for a rom-com or a Disney flick. Rebecca hadn’t seen many of them, either, which Philip found incredible: “You haven’t seen Enemy Mine? You haven’t even seen 2001? Seriously: you haven’t seen Krull? Liam Neeson and Robbie Coltrane were great in that!” “No, no, and no,” Rebecca said. “If it has a gun that shoots lights instead of bullets, I probably haven’t seen it.”

  “Well, we’re going to have to fix that,” Philip said. He spent ten minutes looking at the spines of the disc cases on his shelves. (“I don’t know where to start,” he said. “I don’t even know.”) Eventually, he decided on Blade Runner: he had a special edition of the movie that came in a futuristic-looking silver briefcase, along with some photos of scenes from the film, and a little toy car, and a little origami unicorn. “The problem with watching Blade Runner,” Philip said as he pulled out a folder full of Blu-rays from the briefcase and began to look through them, “is that there are five different cuts of this movie, and none of them is perfect. They all have strengths and weaknesses. So what would probably be best is if I do a sort of curated exhibition of the movie: every once in a while I’ll switch from one cut to another, and explain what the differences are between versions. You’ll get a lot more out of your first experience if you watch it that way.”

  “Hey, can we just hang out on the couch and talk?”

  “But I really want to show you Blade Runner.”

  Rebecca poured herself another drink.

  The subsequent viewing experience severely tried Rebecca’s patience. Whenever she started to get into the movie, which was about a young, handsome Harrison Ford hunting robots in the future, a subject that didn’t appear to be in particular need of scholarly exegesis, Philip would pick up his remote control and pause the film to explain some plot element in excruciating detail. (“Now pay attention here. When Deckard walks into Bryant’s office, Bryant says there are ‘four skinjobs walking the streets.’ And later Bryant says that six replicants escaped from the off-world colony and two have already been killed. The math is fine. But in all other cuts of the film but this one—the Final Cut—the math is incorrect! In the earlier cuts Bryant says there are four replicants loose on earth, six escaped from the off-world colony, and one has been killed. Which raises the interesting question: Who is the missing replicant? Many fans of the film insist this is clear evidence that Deckard is a replicant, but a moment’s reflection should show that this makes neither formal nor thematic sense. It’s safe to say that the dialogue of the Final Cut results from a quiet correction of a continuity error that persisted through the other, older versions of the film.”) How was it that Philip wanted to deliver a dissertation instead of getting his bones jumped? She was doing everything but drawing him a diagram! Finally, when he paused the movie to explain that in some cuts this one character who was the lead of the gang of outlaw robots said, “I want more life, father,” while in other cuts he said, “I want more life, fucker,” Rebecca said, “Speaking of,” extracted the remote control from his hand, and tossed it across the room. “Stop talking so much,” she said. “I like you.”

  They hooked up during the movie’s third act (though annoyingly, Rebecca occasionally saw Philip peeking over her shoulder to watch Rutger Hauer chase Harrison Ford through an abandoned apartment building). The whole thing was rather clumsy—she got a crick in her neck while turning her head to kiss him, and one or the other of them seemed to have an extra limb that kept wedging itself between their chests.

  Doing her best to keep her frustration out of her voice, Rebecca eventually suggested that things would go much better if they repaired to Philip’s bedroom, where it became clear that he hadn’t remotely considered the possibility that he might get laid this evening: the bed was unmade, and a sad, discarded pair of tighty whities lay at its foot, gone loose and gray. They tumbled in a tangle onto the mattress, where it turned out that Philip, perhaps a bit overeager as a result of his unexpected good fortune, was what Kate, when hearing this story later, would laughingly call a “two-pump chump.” And yet there was an expression on his face the whole time that sat halfway between confusion and delight; it was neither the smug smirk of a man perhaps excessively sure of his skills in the sack, or the pinched grimace of a laborer stolidly setting about his assigned duties. There was something genuinely sweet about the way he collapsed next to her, blissful, loose-limbed and silent, after the barest effort.

  She curled up next to him, pulling his arm toward her and draping it across her, listening to his breath slow and even out. He was, essentially, a good person—it was easy to tell this already. And for all his awkwardness and eccentricity, he provided the certainty that he was what he appeared to be. All his words and actions betrayed his absence of artifice. This was a guy you could let your guard down around; you probably even had to. You’d feel like you were cheating him if you kept it up.

  In time, she could knock a couple of the rough edges off him. She could buy him a couple of cookbooks and a set of bedsheets, maybe; the sex could be worked on. But in the meantime: this was nice. This held promise. This was something she could get used to.

  Later, when things started to go wrong between them, Rebecca would look back to those first dates and wonder if, in fact, she’d missed something, some sign in his behavior or his personality that would have signaled how he’d change.

  You can’t tell what history will do to a person. In those early days, before he’d conceived of the causality violation device, his company was a constant delight: he was easygoing and cheerful, kind and guileless, childlike without being childish. And if he was a genius, he wore the mantle effortlessly: though he had a self-confidence that sometimes shaded into arrogance, the flashes of hubris in his speech were only occasional, and gone before you’d think to remark on them. And there was something charming about the way he leapt from subject to subject in his conversation, his tangents birthing other tangents as he teased out the struct
ures of information that lay beneath the surfaces of things.

  His intelligence, back then, was wider than it was deep, but that wasn’t the kind of intelligence that got you remembered, and it was clear to Rebecca that Philip had the same ambitions as any other person in his position would have. But what wasn’t clear to Rebecca was what the eventual choice to focus on a single grand project would do to him over time: she hadn’t known that the effort to accomplish what Science demanded of him would replace his beaming smile with a straight slit of a mouth, and drape his gleaming eyes in shadows, and slowly smother his beautiful magpie mind.

  As Rebecca and Philip spent more time together, the weeks of their incipient romance becoming months, Rebecca’s log-ons to Lovability became less frequent, and eventually nonexistent (though the once-single electronic version of Rebecca still persisted on the site’s servers, never growing older, never changing its tastes and desires, a representation that continued to beckon strangers even as it lay stranded in the past).

  In turn, Philip began to introduce her to his friends, who were mostly his colleagues in the physics department at Stratton. When he was around them, for an after-work meeting at a bar, or a backyard barbecue thrown by a senior faculty member on a Saturday afternoon, he changed a little—it wasn’t so much that his personality altered, but that certain features of it that usually remained submerged when he was alone with Rebecca rose to the surface. He became a little more aggressive in his speech; he lost the unself-conscious grin that bloomed on his face whenever he thought of something interesting, and his rare smiles flashed across his face with a strange flint in them that stopped just short of meanness.

  In general, Rebecca found something strange about the way his colleagues spoke at first—their language just seemed somehow flat to her, in a way she found it difficult to pinpoint. But as she got to know them better, she realized that they’d been socialized into a culture that valued precision in language above almost all other things. And so their speech was often stripped of the components of casual conversation that usually greased it: vague generalizations; idle chatter to fill the air; bullshitting and spitballing. A couple of times, Rebecca made some sort of trivial comment like “Hey, I haven’t heard this song in years,” or “Literally nobody liked that movie,” and the response would be a flatly stated “That must be false,” or “That is highly unlikely,” or “That is untrue,” delivered not in a particularly accusatory manner, as if she were thought to be a liar, but in a sorrowful tone, as if her careless talk deserved the kind of brief chastisement merited by a minor failure of character.

  Arrogance: that featured among Philip’s colleagues, too, though that was more a matter of mien than anything else. If there was one subject about which they tended to be cavalier, it was the ease of doing anything in life besides physics. They were quick to let you know that, in addition to practicing that best and most worthy of all the sciences, they were, as Philip said about himself, “intrinsically multidisciplinary”: they’d casually mention that they’d just cycled their first century, or were doing a show with a local band, or were nearly finished with building a kiln. It was as if the stereotype of the physicist as a bespectacled dweeb was something they felt it was their duty and obligation to strive against. And though they never seemed to be quite as skilled at their extracurricular activities as their pride in them might have indicated, if they were perhaps unlikely to play in professional orchestras or chalk up record-beating times in marathons, then it was even more unlikely that top-level violinists and athletes were doing science on the side, as a hobby. Rebecca was never sure whether there was something about physics as an occupation that made it a magnet for the arrogant, or whether the process of becoming acclimated to the culture of physics involved developing a certain conceit about oneself if one was to succeed, but either way she got the impression that arrogance was often a benefit to physicists, rather than a liability. Hence the steely stare that Philip assumed when he entered a room full of his colleagues; hence the slight hauteur. It was something else she had to get used to, and she was glad, in those early days of their courtship, that she got to see him alone often enough to let him divest that arrogance as if it were an overly warm and heavy cloak.

  And over time, Philip’s peculiar use of language came to make sense to her. If the worst thing a physicist could say about a statement is that it was “false,” the best thing he could say is that it was “interesting.” This was different from saying it was true: most true things were, in fact, uninteresting. Interesting statements lived on the twilit boundary between fact and question; they held the promise of revealing something unexpected and new about the world, and thus were to be treated with respect. The physicists Rebecca met always seemed to be on the lookout for something interesting, a claim or proposition that seemed to possess some kind of rare interior light.

  Rebecca came to understand that Philip’s constant repetition of the word “interesting” meant that he was offering what he saw as the most precious of compliments. And for someone who was in the depths of the blackout season (but who was perhaps coming out now, perhaps seeing a haze in the air that foreshadowed daylight), to be thought “interesting” in that way, considered worth the time to think about by a man who seemed to value thinking more than life itself, was…well, it felt good. Great, really. When the two of them were by themselves, and Philip suddenly got that look on his face of wide-eyed wonder that preceded finding something out, something unexpected and amazing and new: there was nothing like it. Strange, but you couldn’t have a guy look at you like that and not fall for him hard and fast.

  So she did, and it was fantastic. They both dove headlong into the dozens of minor, tender negotiations that presaged falling in love: the restaurants at which they liked to eat together (he, anything but Greek; she, anything but sushi); the time they spent in contact (no, she didn’t need to hear from him every day, though she wouldn’t have minded, it wouldn’t have hurt); the positions in which they slept on the nights they shared his bed (spooning made his arm go numb; sleeping back to back seemed too unfeeling. He slept on his back; she slept on her side to face him). They traded the contents of their minds and catalogued their scars.

  It did occasionally occur to Rebecca that Philip preferred to talk about what he thought to be interesting things, rather than about his own life—granted, her general mode of discourse tended toward funny anecdotes rather than little factoids, but she never got stories out of him about things like the first time his parents let him drive the family car alone, or the enchanting Hungarian woman he’d met while backpacking abroad, from whose company he’d regretfully had to part. It didn’t bother her much, but it did have the effect of making him something of a cipher. (Though if he was a cipher, he was one about whom she had no suspicions—she could talk to him about whatever was on her mind, or simply spend time with him in companionable silence. If he had a past history of secrets that he wasn’t yet ready to reveal, then that was fine.)

  And so Rebecca consigned herself to, not ignorance, but a judicious incuriosity: she decided, for the time being, to live with the constant, cryptic reminders that the scope of another person’s soul could never be fully surveyed. In sleep he squeezed against her as his breathing hitched, and as he mumbled disconnected, nonsensical syllables that might have been snatches of scientific jargon or confessions of nameless sins, she slid the soothing tip of a single finger gently down his forearm, across the back of his hand, and along the faded scar that shot horizontally across his left wrist, keloidal and thin as a thread.

  10

  SERIOUS QUESTION

  Terence had been working at the security desk in the Steiner lab for eighteen months now—it was a good, steady gig, and he wanted it to last a while. A lot of the jobs he worked, he got laid off after a year, or he had to work two of them at the same time to cover food and rent. There had been a few months a little while back where he’d done a full eight-hour shift at a grocery store in Trenton, then driven out to
New Brunswick to spend another six hours sitting in a bar’s front doorway, looking mean and bouncing drunk-ass college kids; then he’d head back home to Trenton when the bars shut down around two. Nights like that, he figured he was lucky he made it to the bed before he collapsed. His wife and his daughter (now in fourth grade) didn’t talk to him much during that time, needless to say: he was either sleeping or gone.

  By comparison, this security job was great. First of all, it was a real full-time job with benefits. It had pretty good health care, the kind that meant you could leave the house without wrapping yourself in bubble wrap. (That Affordable Care Act from a while back had been a good thing while it lasted, but over the past few years the insurance and medical industries had gotten so many changes made to it that you couldn’t call it “affordable” anymore without laughing.) Second, he was technically a Stratton University employee, which meant that if he stayed on long enough, another year and a half, his daughter Harlie would get preferential treatment when it came time to apply for college: good financial aid, and maybe a free ride if her grades were good enough. It’d be good to have that in your hip pocket.

  The one really bad thing about this job was the hours. For most other security gigs he’d done, at department stores or nightclubs or concert venues, the hours were at least predictable, even if they weren’t the same time each week. But in this university lab they were working on some heavy-duty stuff, apparently: word was that it was at least partly military-funded, and these guys insisted on all sorts of protocols. First of all, there had to be two guards at the desk, at all times, twenty-four/seven. Second, they didn’t want either the guards or the people in the lab to get too comfortable with each other, because when you saw the same guard at the same time every day, five days a week, you’d strike up a friendship, and that was when you’d relax a little, maybe, and that was when equipment and design documents would start walking out. So the shifts were completely randomized, and Terence never knew what duty he was going to pull until he got the text message forty-eight hours before. It was good to have a full-time job in this economy, but he was always on call. And he never knew who he was going to get paired up with for the four-hour shift, not until he came in to work. And your shift partner mattered. They didn’t want you screwing around on your phone, or listening to your music, or anything like that: you had to be aware and paying attention the whole time. You were allowed to bring in a book and that was it. And even if you brought a book in to read, you were constantly conscious of this other person who was there in your space with you, breathing and making noises and having stuff on his mind.