Version Control

by Dexter Palmer

  In addition to the grief was the awkwardness that resulted from people who would not have been in a room together except for another person who was irrevocably absent. Rebecca’s parents had not seen Philip’s parents since Rebecca and Philip’s wedding, years ago: Rebecca saw the four of them in one corner of the living room, standing there in communal silence, unsure of what to say. Despite his stooped shoulders, and his hair that had gone fine and white, Philip’s father resembled Philip enough for Rebecca to have a slight jolt of mistaken recognition when she caught him in her peripheral vision. It was his eyes that were nearly identical, though age had turned Mr. Steiner’s to crystal. They would twinkle in better times.

  Philip’s colleagues approached her one at a time, shy and strangely shameful. Most of them just offered quick consolations and retreated, as if she had something catching, though Dennis favored Rebecca with a lengthy monologue on the status of work in the lab and how they were planning to pick up where he’d left off. Rebecca only understood about a third of what he was talking about—he seemed to assume that she knew as much about his research as he did—but she figured that this was his own way of memorializing Philip, and she genuinely appreciated it.

  Alicia Merrill spoke to her last. This was after most of the guests had already left, though a few diehards had decided to stick it out for a while, and Rebecca’s parents thought it’d be rude to ask them to leave. Someone had gotten some more beers from a nearby liquor store, and a few people had taken it upon themselves to reheat some of the leftover Mexican food in the microwave for a second meal. There was laughter in the living room now, light and forgetful. But Rebecca retired to the kitchen, cleaning dishes by hand even though there was a dishwasher right next to her. She wanted to give her hands something to do; she wanted to give her face a chance to wear whatever expression it wanted.

  Alicia appeared in the kitchen doorway. “Hello,” she said.

  “Hi,” said Rebecca, her syllable half sigh. Truth be told, she’d never really liked Alicia: she seemed to have a kind of arrogance that was more attributable to malice than obliviousness, and Rebecca had halfway suspected she had a crush on Philip that he had either not picked up on or been too circumspect to mention to his wife. Though Rebecca felt sure it wasn’t the kind of thing he’d ever have acted on—he wouldn’t have endangered the completion of his great work for a frivolous dalliance with an academic underling, and he was a better person than that anyway.

  Not was: had been. Had been a better person.

  Alicia stepped into the kitchen. “I’m very sorry,” she said, looking up at Rebecca, small and unblinking.

  “I appreciate it,” Rebecca said, which was the response she’d settled on: Thank you seemed somehow inapt, and Well, how do you think I feel sounded ungrateful.

  “There was one thing I didn’t like,” Alicia said. “During the eulogy I didn’t like the God talk. We didn’t need that.”

  “Hm.”

  “You don’t need God to explain these things. That’s the point. He did what he did because of the person he was. He was a good person. You don’t need to explain that.”

  “Oh, wow,” Rebecca said before she thought, then turned her attention back to the dishes in the sudsy kitchen sink, scrubbing off stubborn strings of hardened cheese with a sponge.

  But Alicia still stood there silently, and when Rebecca turned to face her again, she drew near her and gave her a full and unexpectedly intimate embrace, standing on tiptoes and fitting her whole body against Rebecca’s. She had a faint smell of vanilla.

  “I was inappropriate,” Alicia blurted. “I’m sure your father meant well. I’m sure he was describing things as he saw them.”

  “It’s okay,” Rebecca said, marveling that she herself had the spiritual resources to console another.

  Alicia clutched Rebecca for a few moments longer, then abruptly stepped away. “Okay then,” she said, smoothing her blouse and flicking away a stray soap sud. “Okay.”

  “Okay,” Rebecca said, smiling slightly.

  Alicia continued to stare up at her owlishly. “I have an idea,” she said. “This is what I wanted to tell you. You and I. You and I…we could go running together. Let’s go running together, on the towpath. We’ll do it a couple of times, and if it works out well we can make it a regular thing. It’ll get you into great shape. I’ll go a little more slowly than I usually do so you won’t tire out.”

  “I’d…I’d like that,” Rebecca said, surprised at herself for saying so.

  “You should be able to carry on a conversation while running: if you can’t do that you’re going too fast for your fitness level. So we’ll have to talk while we run. To make sure I’m not pushing you too hard.”

  Rebecca nodded. “I understand.”

  25

  BRICTOR’S PARTY

  At last the dreaded day finally arrived, the Saturday night of Britt and Victor’s party in New York City, and wouldn’t you know it: the dress that Rebecca had bought from Conrad’s, the one that had been selected just for her by the benevolently invasive Magic Matching Fit System, didn’t actually fit. It looked okay, but it hung on her like she’d borrowed it from a friend: shapeless in the waist, baggy in the butt. It was stupid of her not to have tried the dress on as soon as she’d gotten home, she thought. But Sean had been home when she’d returned from the mall, and he’d been bullied again at school and was lying on the couch, sniffling. So as soon as she’d seen him, she’d just plunked the Conrad’s box down in the bedroom and left it in its sealed shrink-wrap, taking most of the rest of the evening to talk it through and settle him down. And she hadn’t opened the box until today. She should have known better than to have that foolish faith that Big Data knew you better than you knew yourself. Still, though, the color was nice: she’d deal.

  (Note to self, Rebecca thought: karate classes for the boy. Even if they wouldn’t actually teach him to whip someone’s ass, they’d make him think he could, and the bullies would sniff his self-confidence and back away. At least one hoped. Anyway, mere mothering wasn’t cutting it.)

  Then it turned out that her car was down: apparently it had started downloading an automatic firmware update at three a.m. last night, and the installation process had frozen with the progress bar a few pixels short of completion. A call to customer service got her nothing but a synthesized voice that somehow still seemed exasperated, saying that the car’s manufacturer was “aware of an issue” and that technicians were “working to resolve it as quickly and as safely as possible.” Little good that did, and without the complete firmware update the car was basically bricked: she couldn’t even boot it up to drive it manually. She’d have to ride the train.

  A taxi ferried her to the Princeton Junction station, arriving just in time for her to board a double-decker New Jersey Transit car that took the express route into the city: the next stop was New Brunswick, and then it sped through a bunch of smaller towns to stop at the Newark airport, the junction at Secaucus, and the city. (Strange how all New Jerseyans still referred to New York City as “the city,” as if it were some kind of Platonic ideal and New Jersey’s own attempts at metropolitan areas were pale, unworthy imitations.)

  She had failed to charge her monitor shades the night before, since she rarely used them, and without a book or an e-reader she was forced to resort to her own thoughts to pass the time. She seemed to be the only person in the car without some sort of gadget to keep her company, except for a mother and five-year-old son in the seats opposite her. They looked, she thought with a slight twinge of shame, poor, and after considering her own visceral reaction she realized that it wasn’t because they were Hispanic, or because they were both a little overweight (the mother more so than the son), or because the boy was pulling a burger with a machine-milled patty out of a greasy paper bag, or because if they were already on the train when she boarded, that probably meant they lived in near-dystopian Trenton. The impression she got of their poverty was because neither of them had electronic dis
tractions for eyes or ears, and in a public place that marked you as hard up as surely as if you were dressed in a black plastic garbage bag. Rebecca, realizing this, suddenly became self-conscious, and sat up straight in her seat, as she imagined she would if she’d learned her manners from parents with old money. (Though then she thought that if almost all the people on the train were ensconced in their own private electronic spaces, she was essentially invisible, so her appearance didn’t actually matter.)

  So it was just her and the mother and son, here in what Rebecca would have once thought of as the “silent world.” Most other people on the train were quiet, staring at whatever video image or website was being projected on their monitor shades, but two passengers in the car were shouting into the air at random times: a woman who, Rebecca gathered, was having an argument with her husband concerning some drama with the extended family (“I am relaxed. It’s just that Irene’s coming and I wasn’t expecting Irene to actually accept my invitation….I just made it out of politeness, she should have known that….If I’d figured Irene would actually come I wouldn’t have asked Bill to come too. He’s going to throw a fit….Yes he will, and Irene knows full well we’re loyal to Bill, not her.”) and an adolescent boy who sounded like he was playing a video game online with a group of people scattered across the world, one of those first-person shooters in which men scavenged blasted hellscapes littered with weaponry, piercing each other with bullets and blades while their scores ticked upward with each kill. Rebecca looked over the back of her seat at him: his thumbs adroitly manipulated a pair of wireless controllers in his hands while explosions bloomed on the insides of his shades’ lenses. “Come on would you pop that motherfucker?” he screamed. “The fifty-cal spawns right there! Grab it! Split his head open.”

  Britt would be the one to answer the door, Rebecca thought, and the first thing she’d want to know is why her RSVP, sent a month ago, had been minus the expected plus one. She could already hear Britt saying, “But where is your husband,” in the tone of voice a teacher would use to reprimand a delinquent student who’d forgotten his homework, expecting to hear an excuse involving foreign travel, or separation at the very worst. If she left things vague at first then she’d only be letting herself in for later inquisition once the drinks started flowing, but if she unloaded all the details then and there, then she’d come off as vindictive, as if her sole reason for showing up had been to cast a shadow on another’s grace. No: better to be inexplicit at first, to relay the basics without the backstory. More circumspect; more considerate.

  “I told you I am relaxed, Gary….You’re my husband and if there’s one person in the world I ought to be able to talk to however I want, it’s the man I chose to spend the rest of my life with. Out of all people you ought to understand this. Out of all people you should be the one to cut me a little bit of slack.”

  “Guys, we’re fighting a bunch of niggers this round. You can tell ’cause as soon as they respawn they run straight for the nine-millimeter, like they’re gonna get you with a gat, holding it sideways and shit. A sniper rifle is a white man’s weapon. Let’s grab ’em, head for the high ground, and rain death on these niggers from above.”

  Past New Brunswick the train picked up speed, gravity’s hand gently pressing Rebecca back in her seat as the scenery outside turned to a smear of gray skies and graffiti-covered warehouses.

  Maybe they already knew, all of them: the details were easy to find online, though since she hadn’t shared social media connections with the rest of the gang for years, they would have had to remember that she existed in order to decide to Google her. Rebecca expected that at least some party guests would sneak off to the bathroom to surreptitiously retrieve her vital stats from a phone, sparing themselves the trouble of pretending they hadn’t forgotten her. Though sometimes people would run a search on you while you watched these days: that wasn’t as rude as it used to be.

  Britt had probably Googled her already, actually: it’d be like her to Google everybody on the invite list. Maybe that would make things easier.

  “I told you, Gary, that it’s a bad idea to do business with family. Didn’t I say that. Keep business and family separate, I said, especially if you’re talking about a loan. But you said I needed to be an adult….Yes that is exactly what you said….How are we all going to look Irene in the eye with Bill standing right there?”

  “Thanks for the friendly fire! Fucking faggot.”

  In the seat across from Rebecca, the mother reached over, a beat too late, to cover her son’s ears. She scowled over the back of the seat at the teenager a few rows behind.

  There were times, and this was one of them, when Rebecca quietly yearned for twentieth-century definitions of civility, when commonly shared air was meant to be filled with words generally agreed to be suitable for all. But in the years after Rebecca’s travels through the silent world, the exodus of its former citizens was nearly complete—the only people who remained were the ones who could not afford to leave. Each person now lived in his own handpicked society with its own rules for behavior, and so the world they left behind had no rules at all. If you entered a public space without the electronic means to escape elsewhere while machines ferried your body from one place to another, then you knew what you were getting into.

  Maybe she wouldn’t stick around at the party for long. It was kind of a shame to take this long trip into the city only to turn around after ninety minutes and head back home, but that would be enough time to do what she wanted: put in an appearance, look good (though not as good as she’d have looked if the Magic Matching Fit System had served its purpose), and leave them while still wreathed in mystery, that rarest of information-age commodities. She’d found this Bulgarian woman on Craigslist to babysit Sean overnight. Maybe after the party she could hit a bar before catching the two a.m. drunk train back to Jersey: she could spend some time in one of those well-appointed lounges in the hotels along Central Park South. Maybe she could try her hand at being smiley and leggy and getting a guy to buy her a martini. Though maybe there’d be an interesting guy at the party, some guy who’d also failed to complete his homework assignment of bringing a life partner.

  God, why was she even going to this? What reward was there in revisiting one’s past?

  “Well okay then….Well okay. At the party you take Bill aside, and I’ll take Irene aside, and you talk to him man to man and I’ll talk to her woman to woman. But this is your fault. I just wanted to have a few good friends over for drinks and snackies without all this drama for once in my life.”

  “Where the fuck are you people going? Why the fuck are you dropping out when we’re six kills ahead? Are you leaving me alone here to get shot up by these niggers? Guys I’m gonna get raped right in the ass—”

  The teenager threw his hands up in the air, tossing his controllers away as his monitor shades were yanked off his face. He stared up at the woman who looked down at him, breathing heavily with wordless rage. “I’m not racist!” he yelped.

  In the woman’s fist the featherlight frames bent, and broke.

  “Welcome to our humble abode,” Britt said as she waved Rebecca into the apartment with a grandiose sweep of the arm intended to scotch any attempt to read that greeting without irony. New Yorkers, even the transplants, took such pride in the bits of light and space they’d carved out for themselves in this cramped and darkened metropolis. Rebecca’s house in Stratton was twice the size of this apartment, with its own backyard, but in its context this smaller place, with its low ceilings and rooms that were shaped and fit together like Tetris blocks, still seemed somehow much more opulent. And it had to have been ridiculously expensive as well: Victor had some sort of three- or four-word title at his pharmaceutical corporation—“chief” and “director” and “executive” were all in there somewhere—and pharma money had brought them an expansive view of Central Park uninterrupted by the buildings in between. “The developers bought their airspace,” Britt said as Rebecca drifted to the wind
ow. “It cost a pretty penny: we barely make ends meet.” There was no need for that last little lie: Britt’s mouth twisted unprettily as she said it.

  She looked good. Her face was a little rounder, and each strand of her hair was the same flat gold shade instead of the natural mix of brown and blond she’d had in her twenties. But she’d taken care of herself. Victor had gone stone Daddy Warbucks bald, and also slightly jowly: perhaps the shape of his body had changed to complement his job. He didn’t quite seem to make the matched pair with Britt that he used to. She doubted they chatted about each other constantly when they were apart; she doubted they still dealt in feverish public nuzzling. Such behavior would not be suitable for an Executive Chief Director, a Chief Director Executive.

  Kathryn and Carson were already here, seated on a plush, leather-upholstered couch that looked like it was meant for people who had the money to purchase it but not the time to sit on it. Rebecca could see Victor cutting his eyes over to it nervously—he was probably calculating the social cost of suggesting that everyone make themselves at home on the floor, and weighing that against the expense of shipping a couch polluted with sweat and skin oil back to its Austrian makers so it could be cleaned by the only people who’d know how to do it properly. His desire to avoid embarrassment was barely winning out.