by Delaney, JP
But not people like you and Tim. Not strong, unselfish, principled people. Good people.
If that’s what you are.
“Awesome,” Nathan breathes. He’s looking at the numbers flying across the screen. “I can literally see your mind working.”
“What do you mean?” you say sharply.
“Don’t worry—I can’t read your thoughts. Just see you’re thinking hard.” He glances at the printout you’re still holding. “Going to take that to the police?”
“I haven’t decided.” But already you can see how tricky that would be. The police will reopen the investigation. You don’t know if it’s legal to fake your own death, but you suspect that if they do find Abigail Cullen-Scott alive and well, at the very least there’d be a charge of wasting police time.
More to the point, Tim will know what you did. That you walked out on your marriage. Your disabled son. And him.
You remember what Mike said, that time he came to see you. Remember how fragile he still is, would you?
You can’t hurt Tim like that. At least, not yet.
“If you take that printout to the cops,” Nathan says slyly, “they’ll confiscate the iPad. And there’s more on it, I bet.”
Abruptly, you reach down and pull the cable out of your hip. “Hey!” he protests. “That should be properly ejected—”
“How much more?”
“I’m not sure.” He gestures hungrily at the cable, now dangling from his laptop. “Hook me up again, and I’ll start another batch tonight.”
“No,” you say, taking a step back. “Unscramble some more, and then I’ll see about letting you plug it in again. Nothing gets nothing in this world—remember?”
SIXTEEN
(FEEL FREE!) was probably Abbie’s highlight as our artist-in-residence. People would say to her, “How’re you going to top that?” and she’d just smile and shrug. “Something’ll come,” she’d reply. “It always does.”
But as the weeks, then months, went by, the smile faded. Someone suggested she could do a whole series of putty statues, and she just sighed and said, “Maybe I should,” as if they’d suggested she get a job in an insurance company or something. There was talk of a project making 3-D busts of our heads that came to nothing. It was ironic that, because of the time lag with social media, the height of her viral success with the pictures of (FEEL FREE!) coincided almost exactly with Abbie herself going through a lean period.
We felt disappointed, initially—we’d gotten used to the regular entertainment of her artworks; they lightened the mechanical drudgery of our lives—but we also felt protective of her. Why should she feel obligated to amuse us, like a magician pulling yet another balloon out of his pocket at a party, or a musician playing his greatest hit for the thousandth time? She was an artist, our artist, and her function was lofty and holy.
Plus, she was the founder’s girlfriend. Their romance had started to make headlines, at least on local websites devoted to tech-valley gossip. For her twenty-fifth birthday, Tim hired the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus to sing “Happy Birthday” outside her bedroom window. Then he took her wing-walking, followed by a trip in a private jet to Lanai, Larry Ellison’s Hawaiian island, for a couple of days’ surfing.
But he was still the founder, and work came first. Most nights he’d still be in the office until ten P.M. or even later. And along with the amazing shots on social media of the two of them standing by the edge of a live volcano on Hawaii, there were also darker, more disturbing whispers. Someone spotted Abbie in Slim’s late one night with a bunch of musicians, clearly wasted. Somebody relayed an incoherent conversation they’d had with her in Mezzanine, covered in sweat. She showed up to the office less frequently. And if she did put in an appearance, it was generally in the afternoon, while Tim was always in by seven.
So when she stopped turning up altogether, we all jumped to the same conclusion. We assumed she’d dropped us, and probably Tim, too. “Seen Abbie recently?” became a question we no longer even asked one another, because the answer was always the same. It was as if she’d vanished.
Her six-month-residency end date came and went without being marked, or even mentioned.
It was about three weeks after that that the news flashed around the office. Abbie was coming back! The residency had been extended! No—not extended: resumed. Unbeknownst to us, Abbie had been on sick leave. After that was taken into account, she had twelve weeks left to run in her contract, and would be back with us for at least that length of time.
We did the math: She had been out sick for just over ninety days. We quickly turned to the internet. A link went around to an article headed: “Study Shows Optimal Time for Residential Rehab Is 90 Days or Longer.” Someone else checked the company’s health insurance. Rehab was a co-pay, which meant hefty bills for the individual. But somehow we doubted Abbie had picked up the bill herself.
And then, a few days later, in she strolled, her old self again, the very picture of sun-kissed Californian health—the facility she’d been in had encouraged outdoor work, she explained; the way she told it, it was like a cross between a mental asylum and a kibbutz. She was quite open about having been in rehab. “I had a problem, and when Tim realized, he sorted it,” she said gratefully. It turned out she’d crashed his Volkswagen, and the cops had taken a blood test at the scene. As part of her plea bargain, Tim’s lawyer told the court she was checking into rehab. Meanwhile, Tim simply identified which rehab facility had the highest documented long-term abstinence rate, and that’s where he sent her. Of course.
So then it was just a matter of following in Tim’s footsteps. We put rehab California best long-term into a search engine and came up with Moving On, a small treatment center in Napa Valley that looked, from the pictures, more like a boutique hotel than a detox facility. There was a kidney-shaped swimming pool surrounded by sun loungers and parasols, a restaurant with a vegetarian chef, a gym…The place even had its own vineyard, although the version of its flagship Cabernet served to guests was alcohol-free. The website was coy about charges, but elsewhere on the net they were described as twenty-five hundred dollars a day plus extras.
Some of us had a preconceived notion that places like that were little more than fancy spas. But then we dug a little deeper. The reason Moving On had such high success rates was not the pool, or the gym, and certainly not the alcohol-free wine. Moving On treated addiction with chemical aversives—specifically, apomorphine and succinylcholine. Apomorphine, we read, was administered by injection as the patient prepared to ingest a small quantity of recreational drugs, such as a line of coke. It produced overwhelming nausea followed by involuntary vomiting; over time the two became inextricably linked in the patient’s mind, so that even looking at cocaine induced a feeling of nausea. Succinylcholine was similar but different: It caused immediate paralysis to every muscle in the body, including the muscles of respiration. The subjects believed themselves to be asphyxiating—indeed, they were asphyxiating. The drug wore off in under a minute, but the terror it induced was so severe that its use in CIA interrogations had been banned, even during the Bush era. That rehab had been no vacation for Abbie. And indeed, when we looked at her a little more closely, we realized she wasn’t quite her old self: There was something brittle, something forced about her cheerfulness now. Nor did she dance on tables, or even slip outside for roll-your-owns and gossip in the parking lot. She was as clean as the day she was born.
“I owe Tim everything for helping me sort myself out,” she told Morag in the break room. “I’ve even stopped craving nicotine.”
“I made her better. I fixed her,” Tim told Mike in the same location, a couple of days later. “Anyone would do the same for someone they really loved.”
44
You’re still in shock when Tim gets home that evening, tired but triumphant. Renton’s money has come through. Although he doesn’t actually
say the company is saved, it’s apparent from the relief written across his face.
In the circumstances it’s easy to pretend your own day has been uneventful. You don’t tell him what Nathan found on the iPad. Instead you mention you met Lisa.
He frowns. “Not my biggest fan.”
“She was okay. She was just upset about seeing me on TV like that, with no warning. But I think we’re good now.”
“That’s nice,” he says, a little absently. He’s flicking through emails on his phone. Sometimes there are over a hundred he hasn’t had time to look at in the office.
Is that why you did it? Did you feel ignored?
Everything Tim says or does now is going to prompt the same question, you realize. Is that the reason you ran away? Was that what you found unbearable?
He looks up and sees you staring. “Sorry, babe. I’m being rude.” He puts the phone down.
“No, it’s fine,” you say hastily. “I’ll cook, and we can talk over dinner.”
But you can’t help adding, “Did I mind…before? Was how hard you worked ever a problem for us?”
He thinks. “Sometimes,” he admits. “But when it was, you’d say so, and we’d make time for each other. We always put our marriage first. Even after Danny’s diagnosis, we made sure we got away occasionally, even if it was just for a weekend. His school does residential respite, so sometimes we’d pack him off on a Friday, then head out to the beach house, or take a private jet to Lake Tahoe for a couple of days’ snowboarding. Then he’d come home as usual on Monday, and we’d resume family life.”
You think of the life you must be leading now. You’re pretty sure it doesn’t involve snowboarding or beach houses, let alone private jets. What had that website said? Use a sleeping bag in (non-chain) motels. Never order from chain restaurants. Use alcohol wipes on glasses and cutlery.
Suddenly there’s a sharp, stabbing sensation in your head. Involuntarily, you wince.
“Are you all right?” Tim says, concerned.
“I feel…” Abruptly, you stumble against the stove. “Perhaps I’d better sit down.”
“Of course.” Instantly, he’s at your side, helping you into a chair. “What is it?”
“It’s nothing. I felt dizzy for a moment, that’s all.”
But you know it was more than just dizziness. For a moment, you’d felt a terrifying, nauseous rush of panic. It was as if you were being split apart and your brain was floating away from you, like a bubble of air underwater. A feeling that you were simultaneously you and not you; that you were something impossible, something that didn’t add up…
“That’s not supposed to happen.” Tim looks concerned. “Will you tell me if it happens again?”
You nod. Perhaps you should have let Nathan eject that connection properly, you think.
Or maybe it’s something more fundamental, something to do with what you read on that printout.
* * *
—
Eventually you persuade Tim to go back to his emails. You open some wine, then make a salad.
“Bastards,” he snaps suddenly.
“Who?”
“I thought you said Lisa was on board now.” His fingers stab at the screen as he types a response.
“She is,” you say, mystified. “At least, she seemed to be.”
Silently, Tim thrusts his phone at you so you can read it. The email is from a law firm called Stanton Flowers LLP. The first section seems to consist mainly of impenetrable definitions. (“The entity” shall hereinafter be taken to encompass all personal information, computational networks, and other input/outputs as may be said to form a data file or files…)
“What does it mean?” you say, looking up.
“It means your so-called family wants you destroyed,” Tim says grimly.
“What?”
“And they’re trying to get custody of Danny, too.” He resumes his jabbing.
You stare at him, appalled. “On what grounds?”
“The Danny part? They’re claiming you’re unpredictable and could be a danger to him—that slap you gave the news anchor. The destroying part is that you never gave explicit consent to this.” His face is a mask of fury. “Those jokers. Insignificant, small-minded people who can’t see farther than their noses. Of course existing data laws can’t apply to you. You’re fucking unique.” He jumps up, too angry to sit, and paces around the kitchen.
“She lied to me,” you say slowly. “Lisa. She told me it was like meeting her sister again. But all the time, she must have known about this.”
“I told you she was a bitch. I need to call my lawyer.”
“Now?” you say, meaning, Can’t it wait until after dinner, but Tim misunderstands.
“Don’t worry, he’ll take my call. I’m paying him a fortune. And there’s no way I’m letting those ignorant bastards destroy my family.”
45
That night, sleep mode eludes you. You lie down, but your mind is churning, questions tumbling through your head.
Your disappearance. Lisa’s betrayal. That strange, hidden book. The website Nathan found…So many things that refuse to join up, to make a pattern. You can feel your brain reaching for connections, jumping from possibility to possibility. But nothing clicks.
When you do doze off, you dream about your engagement again, that wonderful night in Jaipur. But it feels different now. Instead of reliving a memory, it feels as if you’re watching someone else. Seeing through her eyes, sharing her thoughts, but somehow an observer, inside the head of someone you simply don’t understand.
Before I do anything else, you think drowsily, I have to find her. I have to know where Abbie’s gone, and why. Only then do I tell Tim—
Suddenly you feel it again—that random, vertiginous panic, so piercing it jolts you fully awake.
You stare into the darkness, aware something important just happened. But what?
Then it hits you. In the dream, you thought about Abbie as “her.” As someone separate from you.
If Abbie isn’t dead, everything’s changed. Because if she’s alive, then what are you? You can’t be who you thought you were. That person—Abbie—already exists.
You’re a copy. A doppelgänger. No, not even that: something indescribable, a kind of abomination, something that shouldn’t even be possible. But definitely not Abbie Cullen-Scott brought back from the dead, as Tim believed when he created you.
Yes, you have some of her memories. You may even have some of her personality. But with different thoughts, different aims, a different identity.
A creature with no name. A thing.
The terror returns—a sense of being split apart—but with it comes clarity.
You are not Abbie.
What are you, then?
Abbie. Not-Abbie. Abbie-negative…A burst of symbols cascades through your head as your mind tries to find an answer to that and fails.
Are you ≠? ≈? ⱥ? ∟? None of them fits.
Another stab of terror, squeezing your brain. Blackness rushing toward you—
And then you know what this feels like.
It feels like being born.
46
“On the face of it,” the lawyer says carefully, “they do have a pretty good case.”
Tim’s features twist into a snarl of anger, and the lawyer—whose name is Pete Maines—holds up his hand placatingly. “Which is not to say they’ll succeed. I just want us to be clear about the scale of the task.”
And the size of the bill, you think cynically.
There are five people gathered around the glass-topped table in the lawyer’s plush office. As well as Maines, Tim, and you, there’s Mike and Elijah, though you can’t actually see what this has to do with them.
Maines ticks off points on his fingers. “First, they’re claiming emot
ional distress. We can pretty much discount that—it’s the usual chaff, to bulk out their other arguments. Second, data protection. That looks scary, but actually data laws are riddled with loopholes, as Google and Facebook know only too well. It’s the remaining three points that concern me more.”
“Go on,” Tim snaps.
“Their third contention is over ‘rights of publicity.’ Unauthorized appropriation of name and likeness for a commercial endeavor, such as the creation of merchandise, is always a no-go.”
“She isn’t merchandise,” Tim says with quiet fury. “She’s my wife.”
Pete Maines continues as though he hasn’t spoken. “The concept of ‘likeness,’ incidentally, has evolved through case law, and can include features such as mannerisms, speech, and personal style.”
“Wait a minute,” Elijah interjects. “I know something about this. Don’t a person’s image rights automatically pass to their estate after their death?”
Maines nods. “That’s correct.”
Elijah looks around the room with a grin. “Well, then, we’re in the clear. Abbie’s image rights are now Tim’s.”
There’s a long silence. Tim shakes his head.
“Why not?” Elijah demands, puzzled.
“Abbie isn’t legally dead,” the lawyer replies. “She’s missing, certainly, and her death has been presumed. But in the absence of a body, or a conviction for her murder, she won’t be declared dead until five years from the date of the inquest. In three months’ time, in other words.”
“So we stall,” Elijah says immediately.
“We can try. But for the same reason, they’ll be pressing to get this in front of a judge as fast as possible.” Maines ticks off his fingers again. “Point four is consent. Did your wife ever explicitly or implicitly give her permission to be re-created in this way?”
Tim’s face is dark. “She didn’t need to. It was understood between us.”
