“Our second-to-last day there, this woman moved into the other side of the house. She had gotten there a day ahead of her husband and her own toddler and was looking forward to some peace and kidless quiet, but instead she got cranky you. Instead of snapping at you or ignoring you or fleeing to another part of the beach, she shut you up by cheering you up—something that had never occurred to me. She took you out for ice cream, and she bought you a kite, and then she took you down to the beach to fly it. When you didn’t feel like kite flying ten minutes after you started kite flying, she put it away and took you swimming. And when you didn’t feel like swimming ten minutes after you started swimming and wanted to fly the kite again, she dried you off and hauled it out without complaint. When she asked you what you wanted for dinner, you said ice cream again, and she said okay to that too. And then she invited you over to watch cartoons in her half of the house until you fell asleep on her sofa.
“She was out in the morning so we didn’t get to say goodbye, but miraculously you stayed happy and complaint-free as we packed up and headed home. You were quiet in traffic and you were quiet when you missed your nap and you were quiet for the whole long drive back. It wasn’t until we finally got home that you told me, ‘It was nice of Mama to come spend the day with me yesterday.’ I was dumbstruck. I was sick to my stomach. I couldn’t think how you’d gotten so confused. And I choked out something like, ‘Sam, honey, that was just the neighbor. That wasn’t your mother.’ And you laughed in such a sad, knowing, adult way and looked sorry for me and said, ‘Don’t be silly, Dad. Of course she was.’ ”
Sam sat and looked at his dad, and his dad sat and looked at him.
“What’s your point, Dad?”
“I have two. One is you don’t need a computer to visit with the dead.”
Sam had no response to this. “And the other?”
“The other is come home for a little while.”
When Sam checked his e-mail the next morning, his father had booked him an open-return flight into Baltimore leaving the next afternoon.
Dash flew up with plans to make Brie for Jamie and run the salon for as long as Sam wished. Sam would do the tech from Baltimore, but Dash was happy to take care of everything else. He was thrilled to have Livvie’s expansive kitchen all to himself, glad to get out of L.A. for a while (things were shaky with the B-list director), and eager to run the salon firsthand for a bit instead of reacting, always, to Sam’s and Meredith’s concerns. Mushy sympathy wasn’t Dash’s style nor were geek armor and techie protection, and he was glad for the opportunity to run his own business his own way for a while. Sam wrote out instructions for the dogs like he was leaving his newborn with a babysitter for the first time, but really it was all very simple.
He went downstairs to tell Penny he was going away for a few days and found Penny-not-all-there instead of Penny-on-the-ball. It was a crapshoot every time who’d answer the door, but it was apparent now right away. He didn’t have to wait for her to talk to tell; he could see it in her eyes. She looked so uncertain. She knew who he was—she almost always did—but she was confused about everything else. Things were starting to fall apart around the apartment again, so Sam went right in and started doing dishes and explanations.
“I’m going back east to see my dad for a few days. Maybe a week or so. We’ll see. But Dash is up there if you need anything. He’ll check in on you too.”
“Oh don’t worry about me, honey. I’m fine. Meredith will take me shopping if I need anything.”
Sam winced. “Meredith’s … gone. Remember?”
“That’s okay. I can wait,” said Penny. “I’m fine for the moment.”
“Not gone,” said Sam. “Gone.” No wonder she was confused. Sam couldn’t bring himself to say “dead,” not that that would have helped her understand anyway. And in some ways Penny was right. Meredith didn’t feel very gone to him either. And in other ways, she embodied gone. Gone was all she was. He plowed ahead. “David and Kelly are making a sign-up sheet so people will bring you meals. Okay? And if you need anything, call Dash.”
“Oh I don’t need anything, dear. I’m fine.” Her mantra. She was fine and needed nothing. Sam couldn’t tell if she was so out of it she believed that or if she was trying to convince herself or if some small sentient-today part of her was intent on sparing everyone else the burden. He felt bad, but Penny was easier this way. She wasn’t sorry for his loss. She wasn’t angry about what he’d said to her. She wasn’t missing Albert. She wasn’t trying to help Sam heal. Foggy seemed to Sam a really great way to be.
He went home for two weeks, and it helped and it didn’t. It was good, he supposed, to get away from the salon, from the users and the DLOs, from the ins and outs and everydays. It was good, he supposed, to get away from Livvie’s—from a home and a city and a whole life that only echoed Meredith anymore. It was good to see his dad. They went to Aunt Nadene’s place in Rehobeth and mostly sat and didn’t talk. Sam went for long, cold runs on the beach before dawn. He went for long, cold walks on the beach after dark. He played cards with his dad and ate out-of-season crabs and drank beers. And then his dad went to bed, and he stayed up all night talking to Meredith.
“Where are you?” she said the first night.
“Back east,” he whispered.
“I don’t want to move to the East Coast,” said Meredith.
“Not moving. Just spending some time at the beach with my dad.”
“It looks like you’re in a cave,” she said, and Sam felt his heart remember the first time she’d done so, in London, what seemed like approximately ten minutes after they fell in love. He remembered too the reason why she didn’t want to move back east: so he could send her dirty pictures without worry that it would wreck his political career. He realized for the first time what his users must have felt all along, the horror that must always, always taint RePose. Being with her felt like a miracle. Remembering felt like hell.
“Not in a cave,” he told her. Again. “Under the covers.”
She giggled. “Why?”
“It’s late. I don’t want my dad to catch me talking to a girl.”
Her voice dropped to conspiratorial whispers too. “What are you wearing?”
Sam’s wrecked adult self gave thanks that they’d had those two weeks in London when they were newly in love and desperate to be in touch any way possible and had cached so much romantic electronic memory. Sam’s adolescent self was distracted.
The next night went less well though.
“You seem in such a funk all the time these days,” she complained.
“Hard day,” he sighed. It had been. It didn’t seem like it should have been—all he’d done was sit on the sofa all day long, read, and watch the ocean through the window. But it had been anyway. Some days were like that. Some days he could get through—miserable, broken, torn apart, emptied, but okay. And some days not. There was no telling which would be which.
“What happened?” she asked lightly.
“Well, you died,” said Sam.
She looked a little puzzled. “Yeah, I know, but I mean what else?”
“Nothing else.”
“That was a while ago though, right?”
Sam nodded. “About a month.”
“Not over it yet, huh?”
“Nope, not yet.”
“I miss your smiling face is all. I miss the happy, laughing Sam.”
“It’s really weird.” He tried explaining the problem to his dad the next day. They were sitting practically in the dune, watching the ocean’s massive in and out, wrapped in sweatshirts and coats with hoods, faces tucked into collars for warmth. “She knows she’s dead. She’s got all of RePose at her disposal—not just the algorithm and UX specs but everything she and Dash and I concocted in the planning stages, all the theory, all the science, all the tech. She knows. But she doesn’t get it.”
“It falls back on its patterns, Sam,” said his dad. “That’s all it has to go on. Anything bad that happ
ened before, you two worked it out and got over it. It doesn’t know that this is worse. Give it time. It’ll learn.”
“How?”
“Because every time it asks, you still won’t be over it.”
“It’s more than that though. She also thinks she’s alive. She knows she’s dead—she knows we’re RePosing—but she also thinks she’s alive. I get that that’s because it’s only based on her life and has no sense of her death. But it’s weird that it can hold on to that incongruity.”
“It’s not incongruous to her. To us, life versus death, real people versus projections, these are opposites. To a computer, the only opposites are one and zero, off and on, there and not there.”
“She is not there,” said Sam.
“And she is also there,” said his dad.
“She’s going to get better and better at understanding. The more we do this, the more holes I plug in the learning algorithm, the better she’ll get. She’ll be pretty close to perfectly herself soon enough.”
Sam’s dad shook his head. “Nope. Sorry. But no. It’s going to get worse, less close, less perfect, less her.”
“It’ll learn. And quickly,” Sam protested.
“It’ll learn, but it will only ever be who she was. You’re growing apart, Sam. Because you’re still growing. And she’s not anymore. Most of your soul just got crushed by a half ton of roofing. You think that’s not going to change who you are? And she’s never met this guy. She can never meet this guy. If she could meet this guy, he wouldn’t exist.”
“So what the hell am I going to do?”
“Hurt. Cry. Kick things. Feel like shit. See friends and family and other people who love you. Feel like shit some more. That’s the way it’s done, Sam. It’s very low-tech. You’re in good company. People have been mourning like this for millennia.”
LOVE LETTER
Dear Sam,
Where I am, I am confused. It’s hard to sort it out and get a handle on things. It’s total upheaval. There’s a lot going on and none of it clear. But here are some things I do know:
1) I never expected to love like this. I expected to love—mostly we all grow up expecting that—but not like this. I had my fantasy about what love and adulthood were going to be like. And I had early crushes and obsessions and young loves and first and second and third and fourth boyfriends and dates and flings and affairs, but none of that prepared me for life with you. Loving you was life with you. They were the same. They are the same.
2) You are a genius. And you have a good heart. This is a powerful combination. I know no one smarter than you. And I know no one kinder or better than you. This means you get to change the world.
3) Absence makes you insane.
Love,
Meredith
FURTHER APART
It didn’t seem like things could fall further apart than they already had. It didn’t seem like anything was connected anymore, so there was no more apart for things to fall. The afternoon Sam got back to the salon though, that was exactly what things were doing. The new users—plus Edith Casperson—were overwrought. They were staging some sort of protest. It looked more like a group hissy fit in the middle of the lobby to Sam, but they swore it was a demonstration of unrest, so what did he know. He motioned with his head for a bemused-looking Dash to meet him in the hallway.
“Hey man, how was your trip?”
“Forget my trip. What the hell is going on here?”
“Things have been a little … dicey. David’s users have some complaints.”
“What complaints?”
“They say it’s not working.”
“The software?”
“Yeah.”
“You messed with the software?”
Dash looked at him like he was a hopeless five-year-old and said nothing for a maddeningly long time. “How am I going to mess with the software, man? I don’t even know where it lives. I don’t know the first thing about it. I could no more mess with the software than hop in the sound and swim back down to L.A. this afternoon. Can’t be done, man.”
“Then what happened?”
Dash shrugged. “Dunno. But you’d better fix it. They’re pretty pissed.”
Sam went up and said hi to Penny who was having a good day and had also baked cookies. The relief of the former and the sustenance of the latter gave him the will and strength to hold office hours for the rest of the afternoon. Eduardo Antigua smirked at him from the corner. Newbies, he mouthed, shaking his head and grinning. Sam cultivated a pile of cookies, a glass of milk, and the air of a civil servant: We are interested in what grieves you; we are concerned; we admit nothing.
First up: Nadia Banks.
“What seems to be the problem?” said Sam.
“It doesn’t work.”
“What do you mean, it doesn’t work?”
“It doesn’t work.”
“Could you be more specific?”
“It doesn’t say what my mom would say.”
“How do you know?”
“She hates everyone.”
“Pardon?”
“She. Hates. Everyone. Everyone! Every guy I go out with, every guy I flirt with over e-mail, every guy I even click on for more information. She hates them all. All! She was not a hateful woman.”
“That’s true.” Muriel Campbell nodded over her knitting. “She was a warm and loving and open soul.”
“Well, warm and loving and open might be a stretch,” Nadia admitted, and Muriel scolded her with a frown from under her reading glasses, and Nadia narrowed her you’re-not-my-mom eyes at her and turned back to Sam, “but she wouldn’t hate all of them.”
“What does she say?” asked Sam.
“Oh, you know, the usual—”
“There it is,” said Sam, but Nadia just rambled on.
“ ‘He’s too tall for you. He’s too French for you. He’s out of shape. He looks like he spends all his time at the gym, so he’s probably vain and self-obsessed. An ad exec who likes to write? He secretly wants to be a poet. He’ll quit his good job within a month and never make more than ten dollars an hour for the rest of his life. That guy spends too much time and money on his hair. That guy can’t even shave for his profile picture, so what makes you think he’ll ever pay you the respect you deserve? Funny guys make you laugh, but they’re covering up for their own sense of inadequacy.’ ”
“She’s not wrong,” Muriel muttered under her breath.
“She wouldn’t say no to everybody,” Nadia insisted. “She’d like somebody. At least a little. I think it’s broken. It’s stuck. Like a record player.”
Nothing like being compared to cutting-edge nineteenth-century technology, thought Sam Elling, master computer programmer and software ninja. “I’ll look into it. Next.”
Edith Casperson plopped into the chair across from Sam. “You know I’m not one to complain. But my husband’s having an affair.”
“That’s not possible, Edith,” Sam said. “Your husband’s dead.”
“Correct. Which is why his confession that he’s started sleeping with his secretary suggests that something is amiss with the programming. First of all, he’s dead. Second of all, please, sleeping with your secretary? That’s so cliché. I finally let the projection get a word in edgewise, and bam, he breaks down crying and says he’s so sorry but he’s sleeping with Leanne.”
“And he never confessed to an affair before?”
“No. Or ever said he was sorry for anything.”
Sam had a headache and promised to look into it.
Emmy Vargas’s concerns were harder to understand because Oliver had learned to walk and also to scream anytime he wasn’t allowed to do so. She tried him on her front then on her back then out of his sling and on her lap, but all Oliver wanted to do was hold her hands and walk. Actually, he didn’t seem to mind screaming that much either, but his mom and Sam and everyone else within earshot chose walking instead, given the options. “All Eleanor can say is, ‘Motherhood is so magical,�
�� and, ‘Having children is such a joy,’ and no, she never feels tired or cranky or angry or impatient or bored or exhausted or despairing or like her whole life is over, and no, she doesn’t mind getting hit and kicked and pooped on and yelled at and woken up at all hours of the night and sucked on like a lozenge—why would she because motherhood is so magical and having children is such a joy? And I think the thing must be broken because really?” Emmy gestured at Oliver who was lying faceup on the floor in the middle of the salon screaming at the ceiling at a decibel level that made Sam fear for the windows, his tiny fists shaking with rage, his tiny feet kicking away any would-be comforters, all because Emmy had said no to his taking more than three of Sam’s cookies.
Sam felt she had a fair point.
Josh Annapist’s complaints had nothing to do with RePose. They were that he was feeling like shit again. The meds he was on to keep his GVHD in check were making him weak and generally exhausted. Or maybe it was the graft-versus-host itself. Or maybe it was something else. He wasn’t sure it mattered. In any case, he wasn’t here to complain. He’d come to chat with Noel, but he didn’t feel up to it, so he thought he’d just sit for a while if that was okay. That was okay, Sam said, and gave him a cookie.
“What we need is a guys’ night,” said Dash. “A guys’ cheese-tasting night.”
“Very manly,” Josh coughed.
“Eduardo’s going to stuff squash blossoms with the chèvre I made Tuesday.”
“I stand corrected,” said Josh.
“And Jamie said he would bring beer. Beer’s very masculine.”
“You guys go ahead. I’m not up for it,” said Sam.
“Me neither,” said Josh.
“I’m jet-lagged,” said Sam.
“I have cancer,” said Josh.
“I have to fix RePose,” Sam added, trumped but holding his own.
Goodbye for Now Page 24
