Goodbye for Now

by Laurie Frankel

  “Oh. Not from this wing, I guess.”

  Sam and Dash looked at him blankly, and David blushed again.

  “I’ve been putting flyers up all over the hospital. Talking to people I know from when my mom was here. I just started. I can stop if you want me to. But isn’t this the point? To help spread RePose to the people who need it?”

  Sam rolled his head around on the wall and squeezed his eyes shut.

  “People with healthy loved ones don’t need RePose,” David posited with the wisdom of a teenager. “But the people here? That’s exactly what they need.”

  They walked in to Meredith in front of her computer.

  Dash strode toward the camera calling, “Hi, Gramaaaaaunt Julia.”

  “Surprised to see me?”

  “Uh … yes. But delighted.”

  Meredith had been feeling miserable all afternoon. Sometimes a girl’s dead grandmother just doesn’t do the trick and what she really needs is her mom. She and Julia had been chatting once a week or so but only awkwardly and briefly because Julia had made it clear she’d let them know when she was ready to talk about RePose. As it turned out, Meredith couldn’t wait that long. She called and started both crying and apologizing as soon as her mother answered.

  “Oh Mom, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry we sprang RePose on you accidentally at Thanksgiving. We didn’t mean to. God, when it rang, my heart just stopped. It was such an awful way for you to find out. It shouldn’t be forced on anyone. No one should have to see that who isn’t ready. No one should have to see it who doesn’t want to.”

  “Oh Meredith—”

  “And I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about it in the planning stages. I didn’t lie, but I didn’t tell you, and I never want to keep things from you. I always value your opinion. It’s just that deep down I knew you wouldn’t approve. And I didn’t want to hear it because even deeper down I was worried that you might be right.”

  “Oh sweetheart—”

  “And now there are these sick kids, and I just feel like crap, and I don’t know what to do, and it’s all falling apart. But I can’t give it up anyway. I’m sorry, I just can’t. And I’m sorry I still get to have Grandma in my life and you don’t. And I’m sorry—”

  “What about the Hammersteins’ vase?” Julia interrupted.

  “The what?”

  “The Hammersteins’ vase. You’re so sorry for everything else. I thought maybe you were making a list. I was doing a custom order for the Hammersteins when you were nine, and I had it just set to dry when you bumped into it dancing to your Thriller tape.”

  “Thriller was a good album,” said Meredith.

  “And the Hammersteins’ was a good vase,” said Julia. “Honey, I knew you didn’t mean to knock it over. As I told you at the time when you cried and cried, for ceramics artists with a child, we lost remarkably few pieces over the years. And I know you didn’t mean to spring RePose on us or to keep it from us or to lie to us about anything. I know you’re sorry.”

  “You do?”

  “Of course I do. And I’m sorry too. I’m sorry we’ve not gotten to know Sam yet. He must think we hate him, but he seems like a wonderful young man to us. I’m so grateful to him for making my daughter so happy, especially through some tough times.”

  “He does, Mom.”

  “I know he does. And I’m sorry that your father and I couldn’t keep an open mind about RePose. You’ve developed this miraculous technology. You’re operating a hugely complicated, hugely successful business. And you’ve had to do it on your own because we couldn’t be supportive. I couldn’t find my way through to talk about it. That’s not fair to you. I’m so proud of you, Meredith—I can’t even tell you.”

  Tears were shed on all sides. Then her mother said, “We’re busy all next month with art shows, but we thought we’d come over that first weekend in October, take you guys to the last game of the season, spend the weekend, see that salon of yours. What do you think?”

  “Oh yes, Mom, please, I would love that!” said Meredith.

  “But honey … I can’t see Grandma, okay? I’d like … I’d like to see the salon, but I really, really don’t want to see Grandma. Okay?”

  “Of course, Mom.”

  “Not ever.”

  “Not ever,” Meredith echoed. “I promise. Thank you, Mom. Thanks. I can’t wait to see you guys.” She felt better than she had in weeks when she hung up. Then she turned to her boys and took a deep breath. “So what’d you find out at the hospital?”

  “We need to let David Elliot RePose for free from now on,” Sam said. “I’m taking an aspirin and going to bed.”

  “You can’t,” said Meredith.

  “It’s been a long weekend, Merde.”

  “It’s Notte Della Pizza. Jamie should be here any minute. I told Penny someone would go down and pick her up at six. I still need to make a salad, and we’re out of beer.”

  “I’ll go,” Sam and Dash said together, neither eager to deal with Penny at the end of this day, both craving fresh air and the bustle of healthy people, but Sam won because his weekend had been worse. In the lobby, he ran into Jamie.

  “I’m making a beer run. Want to tag along?”

  “Should I run upstairs and help Meredith?”

  “Trust me,” said Sam. “I’m the better offer tonight.” But he wasn’t. On the walk to the store, he told Jamie all about Dr. Dixon, the hospital, the kids, their parents, David Elliot, Meredith’s increasing depression, Dash’s childhood friend, and his own sense that more was going wrong than right these days.

  “In addition to being a brilliant manager,” Jamie said, “of both software engineers and marketing women with big hair—polar opposites, by the way, and each difficult in their own right—I am a classically trained Shakespearean actor.”

  “I know this,” said Sam.

  “The problem you’re having is the same one Hamlet had.”

  “Yeah? And how’d things work out for him?”

  “Hamlet’s problem is that everyone wants him to be happy. You’d think that wouldn’t be a problem, but it is. His mum says, ‘Look mate, everyone dies eventually, so I don’t know what you’re so upset about.’ His girlfriend says, ‘It’s been four months, love. Move on.’ His uncle says, ‘Your father’s father died. His father’s father died. They were fine. What are you on about? Not much of a man, are you?’ ”

  “Are you saying I’m not manly?” said Sam.

  “Hamlet’s problem is that he has every bloody reason to be unhappy—his father just died, his mum’s a tart, his whole world is in upheaval—and everyone around him just wants him to cheer up already and do a little jig. Then four hundred years of critics wonder why he’s acting mad. He’s acting mad because his life is maddening. He’s acting sad because it’s sad when your father dies.”

  “You’re comparing me to a homicidal, suicidal madman?” said Sam.

  “I am,” said Jamie. “You’ve gone into business working with people in mourning. Of course they’re unhappy, sick, dead, and brassed off. Of course Meredith’s depressed, and things are going wrong, and nothing makes sense anymore. You should be having a shite weekend, Sam. I should think you’d be having nothing but.”

  “How does Hamlet solve this problem?”

  “He becomes very Zen about it all. Gives himself over to fate. Qué será, será. That sort of thing.”

  “I’m not sure that’s going to work for me,” said Sam.

  “I don’t imagine that it will,” said Jamie. “It did have rather a downside as it turned out.”

  “What else you got?”

  “Perhaps it’s like your Heisenberg joke.”

  “How so?”

  “Feeling lost? Don’t know where you are?”

  “Exactly,” said Sam.

  “But at least you know how fast you’re going,” said Jamie.

  DAVID’S USERS

  To make it seem like they had both options and control, Sam bought painkillers, a buffet of colorful p
lastic bottles. Meredith bought airplane kits. Dash bought cheese-storage solutions. He tricked out a huge old refrigerator that nearly filled the study but left it mostly empty. “Cheese caves require more air than cheese,” he insisted as if he knew what he was talking about. Then he made a cabinet for their storage space in the basement with dozens of plastic boxes he filled variously with cheeses and sponges and then checked for wetness obsessively as if they were newborns. Soon, stashed cheese was aging all over the apartment.

  Sam could feel himself aging too. Over the next couple weeks, David’s users began trickling in. They were different from the ones who knew someone who knew someone whose ear had been whispered in by Dash, and they were different from the ones who heard about them on the news or read about them in the paper. These users had seen the flyers at the hospital or at David’s support group, so their DLOs were mostly pretty recently D. They looked like trauma victims. They were trauma victims. They came in mirror eyed and underweight. They needed no sales pitch, no persuading that RePosing worked. Much that was unbelievable had already happened to them, so RePose seemed par for their already implausible course. They were also quite a bit poorer than earlier users, in part because Dash whispered in swanky circles, but mostly because of the bloodletting of hospital bills and in-home nurses and houses retrofitted for the newly disabled. Meredith’s sliding scale slid lower still.

  In other ways, this round was easier though. A lot of the new users knew David or had spoken with him or at least trusted his advice. They came in with an ally. They were a lot more up on the concept of RePosing and its rules. They understood right away why they couldn’t tell their projection it was dead. They quickly got their heads around the concept, the pitfalls, the ways to train their projections and maximize verisimilitude. Sam thought it was because the software had improved. Meredith thought it was because they were later-generation users. But Dash realized it was because their loved ones hadn’t died in car accidents or from sudden heart attacks. They’d lingered with complex symptoms and complicated drug regimens and ever-shifting prognoses. These users were used to listening carefully to doctors, to articulating clearly what they needed, to researching and advocating, to becoming experts in fields where they had no training and subjects far above their heads. They’d been putting a lot of energy and effort into keeping a loved one alive. Now they took on RePose like a project, a cause, a devotion.

  Nadia Banks was getting back into the dating scene after a long absence nursing her mom but found she couldn’t do so without her mother’s approval. Sam integrated his code with her dating site’s interface so she could share the online profiles with her mom who could then send a thumbs-up or -down vote. “That’s pretty incredible,” Nadia told Sam. “She likes the uptight lawyers and too-old accountants just like in real life. How’d you know?”

  “She did not keep her opinions to herself,” said Sam.

  “No, she did not. It drove me nuts. Never thought I’d be grateful for my mom’s obnoxious big loud mouth.”

  “Don’t knock your mother,” Muriel Campbell called from across the room. “What a sweetheart. She only wanted what’s best for you.” She turned to Meredith and whispered, “Mrs. Banks and my Mario were on the same hall for the last six weeks or so. She and I spent a lot of time together. There’s no father and no other family. She asked me to look after her little girl. Nadia has self-destructive tendencies when she chooses men.”

  “I’m not a little girl,” said Nadia. “I’m twenty-three.”

  “And the self-destructive tendencies?” asked Dash.

  She shrugged. “A good man is hard to find.”

  “Don’t I know it,” said Dash.

  “Big girls don’t talk bad about their dead mothers,” shouted Mrs. Campbell.

  Emmy Vargas came in with a sixteen-month-old, Oliver, strapped to her chest. She RePosed with her twin sister Eleanor who’d had chemo every week with Mrs. Elliot. Eleanor had lived just long enough to see Oliver crawl which Emmy considered a blessing. Eleanor found out about her cancer the same day Emmy found out she was pregnant. That day, Emmy was distraught her baby might never meet her sister. She was distraught her sister might never meet her baby. Later, she was distraught at having to spend so much time growing said baby in a germ-infested, sick-people-filled hospital with its bad energy and worse light. She was distraught at how weak Eleanor got so quickly. And if she was entirely honest with herself, which was rare, she was distraught that she didn’t get a baby shower, didn’t get to drag Eleanor, as she’d been dragged herself, to a dozen baby stores to set up a dozen fancy registries, didn’t get to spend long, leisurely afternoons on Eleanor’s couch demanding foot rubs and banana smoothies. These things were owed to her since she’d done them through both of Eleanor’s pregnancies, and she was distraught at all she was missing out on. She was distraught at all Eleanor was missing out on too of course, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t also missing out on things herself. Now she was distraught with missing her sister which was why she came in, never mind that it was a thousand times easier to stay home than to pack up everything Oliver might need should they stray more than fifteen feet from the house, and never mind that she had to carry an increasingly gigantic Oliver strapped to her person at all times because even at sixteen months he had not yet learned to walk.

  Josh Annapist knew Emmy and David from a Wednesday afternoon support group at St. Giles. He’d been himself, and he’d been with Noel Taylor. He and Noel had been in and out of treatment, often together, often apart as well, for years. They’d met there. Both got better, but only Josh stayed better. They had a lot in common—a shared love of scuba diving in Puget Sound despite frigid temps and murky waters, a commitment to the curative potential of yoga, and large and loving circles of friends and family who just could never understand—really understand—what they were going through. That plus leukemia in their mid-twenties. Without Noel, Josh still had the friends and family, but he was also all alone.

  Before David’s users, the projections had mostly looked vibrant and healthy. They hadn’t done much technology sick. Some had died too suddenly. And some just hadn’t made time for it. They were dying, after all. David’s users had been dying for a long time, so they’d died online too. They’d e-mailed and Facebooked and video chatted and texted and everything else as they got slowly, steadily, miserably worse. Noel Taylor, for instance, just looked like crap.

  “Hey man,” Noel answered, a little bit out of breath, the first time Josh called him up. “You look great. Good day?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” said Josh.

  “The thalidomide’s working finally?”

  “Or the extra prednisone.”

  “Where’s your bili at?”

  “Three and dropping.”

  “Awesome,” said Noel. “Hell, maybe it’s the booby smoothie.” Josh’s acupuncturist had told him that the antibodies in breast milk might attack the T-cells responsible for the graft-versus-host disease which was a complication of the bone marrow transplant that was supposed to be saving his life but so far wasn’t. He talked his neighbor into pumping an extra eight ounces for him every few days in exchange for the gardening she no longer had time to keep up with now that she had a newborn. Josh put the breast milk in a blender with honey, raw garlic, brewer’s yeast, and rosemary. Noel argued that it wasn’t worth it—he chose death instead—and in his heart Josh knew that probably wasn’t what was working, but he still winced when Noel brought it up. When Noel said it wasn’t worth it, what he meant was don’t get your hopes up. What he meant was already I am sick and exhausted, palpated and shot, filled up and drained out, promised and lied to, retaining optimism and making a will, living and dying; I can’t add breast-milk smoothies to the list. If it worked though, Josh knew, Noel would have given anything to try it. But Noel had already given everything.

  “I look like shit.” Noel considered himself in his own mini-window. “My mom’s coming out tomorrow. I’m going to scare the crap out of her looki
ng like this.”

  “Talk to them. Get them to give you a shot of EPO or something,” said Josh, as he had in life.

  “They’re just going to put me on antidepressants.” Noel was right about this. That was exactly what they’d done. “And they’re not going to work. I’m not clinically depressed. I have cancer. It’s depressing.”

  “That it is, my friend,” said Josh. Even the second time around, he didn’t know what else to say.

  “But you look great, man,” said Noel. “You’re giving me hope. That’s the most important thing.”

  Almost everyone in the salon looked up from their projections to shoot Josh a commiserative smile. They got Noel’s joke too. They were used to this mantra, all of them: nothing more important than hope. Josh could think of a few things, a reason to hope being chief among them, not hoping just as a thought-experiment.

  “Buck up,” he told Noel. “You don’t want to scare your mom. I’ll talk to you soon. Sorry you feel like shit.”

  “That’s okay,” said Noel. “You were just trying to help. I forgive you.”

  Josh hung up and went up to the front counter to talk to Sam.

  “How’d it go?” said Sam. “First time’s always hard.”

  “It went pretty well,” said Josh. “But at the end this really weird thing happened. I said I was sorry he felt like shit. And he forgave me.”

  “Oh crap,” said Sam. “I thought I fixed that. Sorry about that. It does that sometimes.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I thought I’d worked it out. Evidently not. Sometimes when you tell it you’re sorry about something, it automatically forgives you, even if that’s not the kind of sorry you meant. It’s like it’s hardwired for absolution.”

  “That’s kind of nice,” said Josh.

  “Language is nuanced,” said Sam. “We appreciate your patience.”

  Meredith was working on a model of the Hindenburg when Sam walked in. “Bad day?” he guessed.

  “What makes you think so?” She was painting tiny details along the blimp’s tail.