Goodbye for Now: A Novel

by Laurie Frankel

  “Why?”

  “They don’t say what they mean.”

  “No one says what they mean.”

  “No one says what they mean all the time. Most people say what they mean sometimes. Usually.”

  “Teenagers don’t know what they mean.”

  “Teenage boys do. They mean, ‘I’m horny.’ ”

  “That’s not what they say,” said Meredith.

  “In fact, it is,” said Sam.

  “I’ll translate for you.”

  “You’re not a teenage girl.”

  “I used to be.”

  Sam looked at her skeptically.

  “When I was thirteen,” Meredith said, “I told my best friend, Luke Feldstein, that I didn’t want to be his friend anymore because he asked me to the back-to-school dance, and I said no because Kimmy Mitchell told Chrissie Graves that she bet I was going to go with Luke, which turned out to be because Kimmy liked him herself, but I thought she meant that I couldn’t find anyone else to go with, and after I said no he asked Anna Wong.”

  “So why’d you stop being his friend?”

  “I didn’t. I just said I wanted to.”

  “Why did you say you wanted to?”

  “It was wrong to ask Anna. He asked me first.”

  “But you said no.”

  “He still shouldn’t have asked anyone else.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he liked me. And I liked him. Like, liked-liked.”

  “Why’d you say no then?”

  “So Kimmy Mitchell wouldn’t think I was a loser.”

  “Were you friends with Kimmy?”

  “No.”

  “Then why’d you care what she thought?”

  Meredith just shrugged.

  “So Luke was just supposed to sit home by himself because you were being insane?”

  “I would have sat home with him.”

  “Did you tell him that?”

  “No.”

  “How was he supposed to know?”

  Meredith shrugged again.

  “Then he had to ask Anna Wong,” said Sam.

  “Why?”

  “Pay attention. He was horny.”

  In contrast to the teenage girls were the grandparents. Like Horton the Elephant, himself never a teenage girl, grandparents meant what they said and said what they meant. When Maggie said she hated her parents, what she meant was that she was seventeen and growing up and feeling at once safe and smothered, eager and anxious, ready and afraid, frustrated and beloved. When Livvie said you and Sam should take some time off and come visit me in Florida because it’s nice here and you work too hard, what she meant was that Meredith and Sam should go visit her in Florida because it was nice there and they worked too hard. On that front, grandparents were much easier. On the other hand, Maggie Benson sent on average seventy-two texts a day. She updated her Facebook page eleven times a day and commented on other people’s pages sixty-one times a day. She kept two blogs, commented on nine others, read fifteen more. She had two e-mail accounts, 2,896 Flickr photos, thirty-eight YouTube videos, and was herself tagged on average four times a day. What Sam did on average four times a day was send a would-be user home empty-handed because their grandparents hadn’t ever used a computer. Old people may be the link to the past and all that, but they lacked electronic memory. The ones Sam could create projections for were usually confined to e-mail. It was a rare elderly grandparent who had a Facebook page or a laptop with a video camera.

  “That’s going to be the trade-off with old people,” Sam complained. “They barely need to be present for their conversations when they’re alive, they’re so obvious. But most of them haven’t engaged with technology any more recent than a toaster oven.”

  “This,” said Meredith, “is why you aren’t in charge of marketing.”

  “And then the problem with young people is they have tons of electronic communication, but they never say what they mean.”

  “So we’re looking for dead fifty-year-olds,” said Dash.

  “Or really tech-savvy nonagenarians,” said Meredith.

  “Or really boring, honest teenagers,” Sam sighed.

  “Or a computer genius of epic proportions,” said Meredith, kissing him on the mouth.

  “With a willing and able fetcher of lattes at the ready,” added Dash, also kissing him on the mouth then heading out the door for the coffee shop.

  In the end, Sam developed a filter to add on to the algorithm for users who’d lost a child under twenty-five that accounted for the fact that teenagers love their parents but don’t say so and skewed the results accordingly. There were parts of this job where even expecting it didn’t help Sam prepare for what came.

  To combat these, Dash designated Sunday evenings as Notte Della Pizza. It was the solution to several problems: It ensured weekly contact with Penny and an opportunity to both feed her and send her home with leftovers. It was an excuse to keep in touch with Jamie, who in addition to being a nice guy was also a reliable potential employee, an idea which thrilled Sam, who thought it was his turn to be boss, and Dash who liked his accent. It was a repository for all of Dash’s mozzarellas, the only cheese he could reliably turn out so far and which therefore rapidly filled all of the space in the refrigerator. But mostly, it fought dead teenagers with what live teenagers—and everyone else of course—liked best: friendship, laughter, food. Refuge in love, refuge in life. It was their only chance all week to really be together. They were together constantly of course, but therefore work time also quickly became all the time. Before breakfast was a great time to worry about UI issues, and in bed was fair game to consider fair pricing, and while Dash pressed cheese into molds he also ran through the legalities of permissions and privacy rights. On Notte Della Pizza, all of that was off-limits because Penny couldn’t possibly understand, and until they could bring Jamie on as Sam’s lackey, discussion of business issues in front of him was verboten, so the intent was clearly focused: friendship, laughter, food. On Notte Della Pizza, Sam got his family back, if only temporarily.

  The occasion of the inaugural Notte was the first time Jamie saw the salon. It was also the first time he met Dash.

  “Quick: favorite cheese,” Dash demanded as soon as Jamie walked into the kitchen.

  “Um … Brie?”

  “Baked and melted, or chilled and semi-soft?”

  “Oh, baked and melted, I should think.”

  “Almonds or pastry?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Do you like it baked with almonds or covered in pastry dough?”

  “I’m quite flexible as regards Brie,” said Jamie.

  “But it’s your favorite cheese. You should have a definite preference,” said Dash. “Brie is an odd choice for a Brit anyway. Stilton. Cheddar. Something hard and crumbly. That’s what I was expecting.”

  “There’s Somerset Brie. Cornish Brie,” Jamie offered.

  “But don’t you think they’re French influenced?” asked Dash.

  “I’m not sure,” said Jamie. “Why are you asking me about cheese?”

  “Well I make cheese, as you see.” Dash gestured at his supplies all around him. “I’m taking requests.”

  Meredith rolled her eyes. “You only know how to make mozzarella. Who cares what kind of cheese he likes when you can only make one?”

  “I was hoping he’d say mozzarella.”

  “Mozzarella’s not British either,” said Meredith.

  “No, but think how awesome it would have been if he’d said mozzarella, and I’d thrown open the fridge dramatically.” He demonstrated. Inside were piles and piles of Tupperwares Jamie could only assume, at that point, contained mozzarella.

  “No one’s favorite cheese is mozzarella,” said Meredith.

  “Then you can just have naked pizza tonight and see how you like it,” said Dash, drying his hands on an apron that read “Fellate the Cook” and offering Jamie his hand. “Dashiell Bentlively, by the way.”

  “Bentl
ively?” Jamie wondered, and Sam remembered the first time he’d met Dash. “Are you a Dickens character? Are you an at-first-appealing-but-later-too-much-of-a-bad-boy fellow in a Jane Austen novel?”

  “I am a bad boy,” Dash allowed, “but I’m appealing the whole way through.”

  “Let me show you the salon while the pizza bakes,” said Sam.

  “Ten minutes max!” Dash warned.

  Sam took Jamie downstairs, and they stood considering Salon Styx in the purple half-light of dusk. “Pretty. Better place to meet the dead than usual.”

  “What’s usual?” said Sam.

  “I don’t know. Creepy graveyards. The apocalypse.”

  “Meredith did a nice job. Painted, decorated, hung airplanes.”

  “She’s quite talented. I knew there was a reason I hired her.”

  “You didn’t hire her.”

  “I don’t think it’s the paint and airplanes that make the place anyway.”

  “What then?”

  Jamie shrugged. “Maybe it’s occupational hazard, but I always think computers have a romantic glow about them. Full of promise and prospect. Especially when they’re off like this. One has the impression that with the flick of a switch, all possibilities can be explored, all dreams might come true. Computers hold magic, you know.”

  “That’s awfully cheesy,” said Sam.

  “That’s why I’m an important manager and you’re unemployed,” said Jamie. “Poetry. Poetry makes all the difference.”

  “I had no idea,” Sam admitted.

  “Seriously, Sam, it’s most impressive. Not just the space. Not even mostly the space. What you’ve done here, what you’re doing, it’s a good thing. You might change the world.”

  “That might be overstating it.”

  “It’s a good thing you’re a kindhearted genius and not the evil kind.”

  “That would ruin everything,” Sam agreed.

  “Exactly, whereas now the only thing you’re ruining is me.”

  User numbers grew, which was good, as did expectations, which was predictable, as did the menu of options, which caused some problems. On behalf of the Bensons, Sam worked on text messaging. He thought the instant gratification of that would be very popular and that it would be easy to replicate, even from the unpredictable, as-a-rule-dishonest teenage set. But texts were too short to be gratifying and usually just named times and places DLOs promised to meet their users which, of course, was especially cruel. Some people wanted to follow their dead mothers’ Twitter feeds. But most, not surprisingly, did not.

  In the end, most people chose e-mail or video, one edge or the other of the tech spectrum, e-mails little more than a glorified letter, video chat fairly close to God. E-mail was more gratifying, more lingering. You could say exactly what you meant, get it all out of your system, receive back a reply you could print and carry in your pocket and clutch against your chest. Video chat held none of those advantages, but it took people’s breath away. They just could not believe it. And could not get enough. It was addictive. Its trump was simply its unbelievable verisimilitude. It just seemed so damn real. If you tried to get mushy or romantic or weepy with it though, it just looked at you like you were nuts and asked, casually—even, to users’ bruised memories and mourning hearts, cruelly—what the hell was wrong with you man, or words to that effect. It did not get—and could not be told—why you were so sad. So users ended up lying to their projections. Oh, no, nothing was wrong. Everything was fine. Same old, same old. And what’s new with you?

  Sam’s dad was right. Users met their projections more than halfway, nudged them in directions they wanted to go, avoided what would trip them up, worked to make it all work. But the real miracle was that the projections met their living loved ones the other half of the way. Users lied, evaded, talked around, hinted at, blubbered incoherently, and fabricated wholesale, yet they managed somehow to get the responses they craved anyway. These were loved ones, after all. The whole thing worked in the first place because these people knew each other well, loved each other much, and communicated intimately. They understood without understanding. They responded to what they did not even notice. They called their user petit chou which they never did except when she was really, really vulnerable. They called their user Tarzan which they never did except when he really, really needed pumping up. They were moved to tell users how much they loved them even though they told them all the time. They were moved to tell users they were proud of them, thinking of them, praying for them, besotted with them, so lucky to have them—uncannily whatever they needed to hear because without knowing it, users had asked for it, had planted the seeds that yielded that response. It was like a dance. And both sides were very well trained. This, of course, had been true in life as well.

  Meredith proved right about needing the space too. Though users could RePose anywhere they had network connectivity, lots of them chose to start in the salon instead for all the reasons Meredith had predicted. People were afraid of ghosts. They wanted handholding and editing while they wrote their first e-mails and replies, advice about what to say and how to say it. Support for the Herculean effort not to blurt out the sad news of the projection’s recent demise. Just someone else’s presence deterred them. Some of it was having to look up from the computer at Sam’s stern face, the very one that had just patiently explained why you couldn’t tell it it was dead. Some of it was strength in numbers—if the users to your right and left could find other things to talk about with their projections, surely so could you. But much of it was the jarring unreality of Salon Styx. RePose worked precisely because it was so exactly like what you both remembered, but what you remembered had never happened here—in this bright room overlooking the mountains and the water with Dash and Meredith and Sam gazing benevolently over all they had made possible, their Eden. Many users needed that distance from what it felt like. Otherwise it was too real, too much what it was. Otherwise it was too frustrating that your DLO would communicate with you only online, would never meet you for coffee, meet you in bed. Come home from college. Come home from Florida.

  It was hard too for Sam and Dash and especially Meredith. Though users had a need she could address, that need was bottomless. They were often weepy all through the sign-up process, the start-up how-to lecture, paying their fees, signing the forms, releasing the info, but when they came in finally to begin, they’d be totally wrecked. Often it took days of coming in every morning, sitting down at the computers, leaving again before they could begin. Meredith would hold their hands, hug them while they cried in her arms, sit and listen to them reminisce for hours. Feed them tissues. Assure them everyone had trouble the first time. Assure them they could try again tomorrow. Assure them the first one was the hardest one. It made her sad and wrecked and weepy too.

  “This isn’t your job,” Sam worried.

  “Of course it is,” she said.

  In contrast, Sam’s approach was to demystify. No need to be freaked out and upset. Just a computer program. A bunch of electrons. These ghosts were no more real than the ones in Ms. Pac-Man. Make-believe. Really, really impressive make-believe.

  Dash, as ever, played the field. He sized people up and gave them what they needed. If they needed holding, he held. If they needed to minimize it, he minimized. Avery brought in a box of Clive’s fancy dress shirts, and Dash wore one every day for a month, never mind his insistence that clothes didn’t matter in Seattle. Edith ran out of nasty names to call her husband, and Dash came up with “gubbertush,” which meant bucktoothed but with the added bonus connotations of both “goober” and “tush.” Mr. Benson got a text from Maggie that confessed, “Wrecked car. But I’m fine. Am also accidentally in Idaho so might miss curfew. Sorry!”

  “What do I do with that?” asked Mr. Benson helplessly.

  “What did you do the first time?” said Dash.

  “Drove out to Idaho and picked her up.”

  “What did you want to do?”

  “Drink heavily. And gro
und her until September 2035.”

  “Do that now.”

  “Can I?”

  “Sure. Might be cathartic.”

  “I never thought I’d be nostalgic for a fight with my teenager.”

  “Ground her and I’ll take you out for the first part,” said Dash.

  “The first part?”

  “Drinking heavily.”

  It was hard to watch users, hard to be with them, hard to help, but it was also gratifying. Watching people’s faces light up, watching their smiles triumph through their tears, watching people catch their breath and hold their heart and whisper oh thank God thank God. You could see their relief. You could watch them let go. And often, very often, Sam found them back in his arms afterward. Thank you so much. You have given me the greatest gift. It was even better than I’d imagined. I feel so much better now. You let me let go. You let me say goodbye.

  People signed up to say goodbye. But then they got addicted and couldn’t. That was another thing Meredith was right about: death is for life.

  ALBERT

  That they had any warning at all, that they didn’t just offer to send her in blindly as they did everyone else, was something of a fluke. A few weeks after they’d more or less adopted Penny, Meredith thought she was ready to RePose.

  “She’s too old,” Dash argued. He’d spent the afternoon at Penny’s helping her organize her kitchen and had just gotten back from taking her out for pizza and ice cream.

  “She’s not too old. She’s Grandma’s age,” said Meredith.

  “Grandma was too old to RePose too.”

  “She uses it all the time.”

  “No, Merde,” said Sam. “You use it all the time. Livvie doesn’t.”

  “Well. She would.”

  “She was pretty tech-savvy for an old lady,” said Dash. “But I don’t mean that Penny couldn’t do the tech. I mean I’m not sure she could get her head around the concept. Young people are used to having virtual relationships, to watching great big pieces of their lives unfold on-screen, online. I think it’d be too much for her.”

  “Was she acting weird?” said Meredith. “Did she seem out of it again?”