“I guess.”
“It’s not going to be smart, Sam. It’s not going to have free will. It’s not going to be human. All it’s going to be is what it was before. It’s a mimic. It’s like a mynah bird—you can make it sound human, but it’s not going to understand or even mean what it’s saying.”
“But the closer it is to real, the more users will forget all that.”
“Yes indeed. Users are always the problem. You know what would help? A redirect. Something it can say to warn the user when it gets confused.”
“I guess,” Sam said again. “You think any of this is possible, Dad?”
“Sure. Why not?” Here Sam was reinventing the rules of life, love, and death, and his dad was not much more than vaguely intrigued. This was what he loved about his father.
“And a good idea?”
“Well, a good thought experiment in any case.”
The more Sam thought-experimented about it, the more he realized his dad, as always, was right. The first Not-Sam had been closest of all to human, closest of all to Sam. Confused wasn’t a failure; it was a victory. Confusion in the face of a making-no-sense Dash was exactly the reaction a real Sam would have. Tom Holly and the capital of the Northern Region of Ghana were computer responses, but they didn’t want computer responses. They wanted human responses, and Not-Sam 1.0’s puzzled and vaguely bemused conviction that Dash was screwing with him seemed the most human one of all. Sam dialed back Not-Sam’s access to the internet. He deprioritized his archive with everyone but Dash. He pyramided what Not-Sam knew, what he could know: a lot of his interactions with Dash, a little of his interactions with everyone else, a smidge of the rest of the world, a delicate balance of the known, the unknown, and the unknowable.
“That bitch lied to me.” Dash was incredulous. “It said it was going to go look in the bedroom, and it never came back.”
“My dad says we need a catchphrase,” Sam reported.
“How about, ‘Don’t lie to me, bitch’?”
“Not for you. For it. A ‘does not compute,’ an ‘abort, retry, ignore,’ a ‘whatchoo talkin’ about, Willis’ for the projection to say when it becomes confused, when you ask it a question it doesn’t have enough information to answer, something to gently guide the user to a different line of conversation.”
“ ‘Back off … or else,’ ” Dash suggested ominously.
“Gently guide,” Sam reiterated.
“ ‘I’ve no idea what you’re on about’?” said Meredith.
“Too British,” Sam objected. “You’ve been spending too much time with Jamie. Less work for you.”
“That’s why we need to get rich,” said Dash.
“ ‘Who wants to know?’ ”
“ ‘Why do you care?’ ”
“ ‘Never have I ever …’ ”
“ ‘No hablo inglés.’ ”
“ ‘You do not have access to those files. Please contact your service administrator.’ ”
“ ‘I love you and would never hurt you,’ ” Meredith offered, suddenly serious.
“How does that mean, ‘I don’t have enough information to answer that question’?” asked Dash.
“ ‘I don’t have enough information to answer that question’ is evasive. ‘I love you and would never hurt you’ actually speaks to the issue.”
“Which is?”
“Which is that the real point of all these conversations will always be: ‘I love you and would never hurt you. I miss you so much.’ ”
They settled on, “I’m sorry, sweetie, I don’t understand,” with a dropdown menu in the preferences setup so that you could change “sweetie” to “honey,” “baby,” “angel,” “love,” “dear heart,” or your user name as you wished.
Forget really good internet dating. Without even trying, without even deciding to really, somehow Sam had invented eternal life. Immortality. Not for you, but you wouldn’t care because you’d be dead. As far as your loved ones were concerned, however, Sam could keep you alive and with them forever. How was that not immortality? Sam felt vindicated. Maybe internet daters matched and then quit, but people who died stayed dead. Sam could bring them back, but only so long as you paid for the service.
“Dating is temporary,” said Meredith. “Death is for life.”
Nothing unknown is knowable.
—TONY KUSHNER, Angels in America
DEAD MAIL
They spent a lovely, rainy family Christmas together watching storms move in and out again in a big cabin they rented on Whidbey Island. Sam’s dad came out for the great meeting of the parents. Uncle Jeff and Aunt Maddie agreed to stay at the cabin instead of at a fancy hotel, largely because the island didn’t have a fancy hotel but also in the spirit of the season. Kyle and Julia each pulled their daughter aside within five minutes of her arrival to say they loved her and merry Christmas and they couldn’t wait to meet Sam’s dad, but they did not wish to discuss what happened over Thanksgiving and could they all please just leave it alone. Meredith squeezed their hands and looked remorsefully at her toes and nodded soberly. Dash winked at her in conspiratorial solidarity.
The cabin was huge and sprawling. The owners must have built it piecemeal as they could afford to because bedrooms and bathrooms seemed tacked onto corners or nestled at the backs of hidden hallways or accessible only via ladders or by traversing empty loft spaces or in one case by going outside and back in again. On the third day they were there, Aunt Maddie found a fourth bathroom no one had noticed before, tucked into a crawl space in the attic eaves. But it had a great room and a wall of windows looking out over the bluff and the sound below and the mountains beyond in and out of clouds. And it had a kitchen large and equipped enough—and that was saying something as it turned out—to sustain all of Livvie’s holiday food traditions.
There were cookies on every horizontal surface. New ones were made daily, never the same ones twice, never even the same set of bakers involved. There was a red-and-green-dyed cheese ball one night covered in chopped nuts and stuffed with mushrooms that challenged even Sam’s lactose love affair. There was gumbo and lasagna and clams they dug up themselves along the beach with the dogs. Hors d’oeuvres and dips and snacks appeared hourly, often though not always holiday themed, often though not always identifiable. There were miracle, endlessly self-replenishing bowls of homemade Chex mix everywhere, and a new batch was always, always in the oven. Sam and his dad kept exchanging silent, wide-eyed glances over the food. Their holiday tradition had generally involved Christmas Eve dinner at the home of an aunt or a department chair, the exchange of one gift apiece Christmas morning whenever they got out of bed, followed by cereal or oatmeal and then a movie in the afternoon. When Sam was a kid his dad had made a bigger deal—more presents, a pass at decorating, carols on the radio—but neither of them missed it as Sam grew older, and they’d just phased it out he supposed. It didn’t seem worth the fuss for just the two of them.
Now though, everything was different. Everyone’s life was about to change. Sam felt that. He knew it. Behind him were all those Christmases he and his dad had spent alone together, and now here was this huge family—aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws, marathon games of Trivial Pursuit, holiday traditions involving foods Sam couldn’t imagine eating for any other reason (why would you dye cheese?), half-finished jigsaw puzzles on fifty percent of the tables in the house, and people everywhere you looked. This is what it’s going to be like from now on, he thought. Family and drama and food and love and tradition. Everything was changing.
They stayed for a week, and every day had a theme—another of Livvie’s brainstorms, evidently, which had no doubt been fun for six-year-olds Dash and Meredith but seemed to Sam to have outlived its relevance. On the other hand, thirty-four-year-olds Dash and Meredith seemed to be enjoying themselves thoroughly, so what did he know. “Old traditions die hard around here,” Dash shrugged at him on Christmas Pajama Day when he came down for dinner in fleece reindeer pants and a pajama top covered neck
to hem in one giant (and Sam thought terrifying) Santa face. But it wasn’t until Eggnog Day that they hit any real trouble.
Eggnog Day was just like it sounded and did not prove to be optional. The very stocked liquor cabinet was locked, the wine and beer all pointedly consumed by the night before. The choice was eggnog or nothing. For Sam, this was an easy decision—he was due for a dry day anyway. He was also fantasizing about salad, after all those days of snacks and cookies, and spent the afternoon chopping vegetables into tiny, gratifying pieces. It occurred to him around sunset that he hadn’t seen Meredith in more than an hour. Dash hadn’t seen her either nor had anyone else. Sam looked in their bedroom, on the deck, in the game room and library. He wandered down the beach a bit in both directions but found no sign of her. It didn’t seem like she could have gone far—in fact, it didn’t seem like she could have gone anywhere—but a cursory search and then a more thorough one and then starting to become truly alarmed yielded nothing.
He called. She didn’t answer, and he couldn’t hear her phone ringing anywhere in the house. He was just starting to panic in earnest when he got a text. In its entirety, it read, “Uuuuuuuhhhhhhhhnnnn.”
“ARE YOU OKAY???” Sam shrieked via text message.
“No.”
“Where are you, Merde?”
“Do you believe in hell?”
He could barely breathe. “Are you hurt?”
“Everywhere.”
She’d been drugged, he guessed. Or hit on the head.
“Who’s hurting you?”
“Uncle Jeff.”
Uncle Jeff was in the kitchen with everyone else, reading over Sam’s shoulder, trying to figure out what the hell was going on.
“Are you alone? Is someone there with you?”
“I’m so alone.”
“Why can’t you answer your phone?” he typed.
“Not a good time to talk,” she said.
“Look around. Tell me what you see.”
“Ugly wallpaper. Filthy floor. Foul smell.”
“What do you remember about getting there? Were you …” He paused, swallowed, squeezed his eyes shut then open again and made himself finish typing, “… conscious?”
“???” she wrote.
His brain sped, a pulse racing behind his eyes, deciphering that, deciding what it might mean and what to say next when his phone buzzed again.
“Oh Sam! I didn’t get kidnapped, you idiot.”
There were loud exhalations of held breaths from everyone in the kitchen. But Sam-confused felt more like Sam-panicked than Sam-relieved.
“What then?”
“Food poisoning, I think.”
“Food poisoning?!”
“Uncle Jeff poisoned me with eggnog.”
“WHERE ARE YOU?”
“That weird bathroom Aunt Maddie found on the fourth floor.”
“WHY??”
“Privacy.”
“I looked everywhere for you. You scared me to death.”
“Sorry. Just trying to get everything in me out of me. In peace.”
Sam tried to quiet his heart. Everyone else’s anxiety passed quickly to relief then giddiness. They adjourned to the living room and started telling embarrassing Meredith childhood stories, adding this incident to the canon. He tried lightness:
“That bathroom was really gross.”
“Not as gross as it is now,” wrote Meredith.
But he couldn’t quite shake the black panic that had so quickly engulfed everything. He went up to the third-floor landing, through the trapdoor in the ceiling, across the gapped, unfinished floorboards in the attic, into the slant-roofed crawl space, and sat with her, leaning against the doorframe while she hunkered down inside. She wouldn’t let him in, so he talked through the door. He told her jokes. He told her stories from his own embarrassing childhood. He made up parables about the hazards of raw eggs and the creatures living inside of them that there was not enough bourbon in all the world to kill. She alternately giggled and dry-heaved and moaned through the door until finally she texted, “I have shat all there is to shit. Barfed all there is to barf.”
“You sure?” he replied. “Don’t want to rush these things.” His ass had fallen asleep long ago. He suspected everyone else in the house had done the same.
“All done, I think,” she wrote. “Miss me?”
“How could I? I’ve been here all along.”
“Thanks for sitting with me, Sam.”
“Thanks for not being kidnapped.”
“Anytime. Now go wait for me downstairs. This bathroom needs to be alone for a while and think about what it’s done.”
The only good thing about the eggnog incident, apart from her not being kidnapped, was that even really pissed-off parents are unreservedly moved to take care of their sick kid. Meredith and Julia and Kyle had been awkward together all week, careful of what they said and where they looked and how they touched one another, pleasant but also trying way too hard. Now Kyle ran to the store to fetch saltines and ginger ale and egg noodles and the makings for chicken soup. Julia sat with her daughter’s head in her lap and stroked her face and hair and refused to move or let Meredith move all the next day. They camped out in the den and watched old movies. Both were delighted.
“You okay in there?” Sam texted late in the afternoon.
“Are you kidding? I’m great. It was totally worth it.”
They tried to put it off—they did put it off—but by their last night in the cabin, it was time to talk logistics. The plans for Dead Mail had gone from exciting to paralyzing as the realities came more clear. Meredith was going to have to quit her job, which terrified her. Dash was going to have to add balls to the dozens he was already juggling, which thrilled but also terrified him. Sam was going to have to work with actual humans which was most terrifying of all. Meredith was also feeling bad about lying to her parents. She knew they’d find out eventually, but she didn’t want them talking her out of it before they got started. While they hammered out details, she gave Dash then Sam then the dogs then herself blue glitter manicures (she’d gotten a nail polish sampler in her stocking, another age-old family tradition apparently). Sam thought maybe it was the only way, a balancing out. They could confront so much responsibility and tragedy only if they did it while wearing reindeer-antler headbands.
“You know we can’t keep calling this thing Dead Mail,” said Dash. “It’s unrefined.” He was stirring a double shot of peppermint schnapps into a mug of instant hot cocoa with a candy cane. Sam only raised an eyebrow at him by way of response.
“Plus you’ll never get it past marketing,” said Meredith.
“We could call it d-mail,” said Sam.
“D-mail?”
“Sure. Like e-mail. Or Gmail.”
“Only if no one asks what the D stands for,” said Meredith. “How about iMortal?”
“Steve Jobs will sue us,” said Dash.
“He’s dead,” said Meredith.
“Exactly. E-mortal? Like immortal?”
“Maybe we don’t want people associating us so much with death,” she said. Sam could only raise an eyebrow in response to that one too. “E-vive? That’s got more life in it.”
“It sounds like wash-away-the-gray shampoo,” said Dash. “Re-vive?”
“Even worse.”
“E-lan?”
“E-lide?”
“E-volve?”
“E-scape?”
“E-face? That one works on a couple of levels,” said Dash.
“E-late?” said Meredith. “That works nicely too.”
“I thought you wanted to get away from death,” said Dash. “Re-late?”
“Like, ‘Here’s my late father. I’m re-lating him’? No. Re-volve?”
“Re-vive?”
“What about re-pose?” Sam interrupted.
“Re-pose?”
“Yeah, like re-pose: to pose again. And also like repose. Like to lie in repose for viewing before burial. And also repose: t
o be still, calm, at rest, at peace.”
No one said anything for a moment. Then Dash threw a green Trivial Pursuit wedge at his cousin. “God, Meredith. Why does your boyfriend always have to be the smartest guy in the room?”
Just after New Year’s, Dash started flitting back and forth between Seattle and L.A., crashing at Sam and Meredith’s a couple nights a week as things got started. He brought only a single small duffel bag of clothing, explaining that no one cared what you looked like in Seattle, so he was leaving all his “threads” in L.A. where they mattered. But in addition to the duffel, he hauled in six FedEx boxes of mats, boards, pots and bowls, cloths and colanders, thermometers, trays, measuring cups and spoons, ladles, scales, presses, molds in every shape and size, and dozens of tiny envelopes of mysterious powders and teeny bottles of mysterious liquids.
“Crystal meth,” Meredith guessed.
“Please,” said Dash.
“You’re becoming an apothecary,” Sam predicted.
“Too Romeo and Juliet. And look how that ended.”
“You’ve been reading too much Harry Potter,” said Meredith.
“No such thing.”
“You’re dating a sculptor,” Sam suggested.
“Nope. Cheese.”
“You’re dating a cheese?”
“I’m going to make cheese.”
“You don’t cook,” said Meredith.
“Correct. Because no one cooks in L.A. And certainly, no one makes cheese. Making cheese is not an L.A. thing to do. But it is a Seattle thing to do. Wear fleece. Make cheese.”
“Why?” said Sam.
“It’s chilly. And cheese is good.”
“It is.” No one had to talk Sam into cheese. “But we have stores up here, farmers’ markets, dairies even.”
“Look, if I’m going to be half a Seattleite, I need to fit in. If I’m going to be living here—”
“Who says we want you living with us?” said Meredith.
“This is Grandma’s house,” said Dash. “I’m as welcome as you are.”
Goodbye for Now Page 11
