by T. C. Boyle
“I must have fallen asleep,” I said. “Really. I just zoned out.”
She knew I was lying. She’d come looking for me, dutiful child, motherless child, and found me not up and about and bustling around the kitchen preparing to fuss over her and see her off to school the way I used to, but pinned here in this chair like an exhibit in a museum, blind to anything but the past, my past and nobody else’s, not hers or her mother’s, or the country’s or the world’s, but just mine.
I heard the door slam. Heard the thump of her angry feet in the hallway, the distant muffled crash of the front door, and then the house was quiet. I looked at the slit in the box. “Play,” I said.
By the time I got to work I was an hour and a half late, but on this day—miracle of miracles—Kevin was even later, and when he did show up I was ensconced in my cubicle, dutifully rattling keys on my keyboard. He didn’t say anything, just brushed by me and buried himself in his office, but I could see he was wearing the same vacant pre-now look I was, and it didn’t take much of an intuitive leap to guess the reason. In fact, since the new model had come on the market, I’d noticed the same randy faraway gaze in the eyes of half a dozen of my fellow employees, including Linda Blanco, the receptionist, who’d stopped buttoning the top three buttons of her blouse and wore shorter and shorter skirts every day. Instead of breathing “Moos and Associates, how may I help you?” into the receiver, now she just said, “Reset.”
Was this a recipe for disaster? Was our whole society on the verge of breaking down? Was the NSA going to step in? Were they going to pass laws? Ban the box? I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I had a daughter to worry about. Thing was, all I could think of was getting home to relive, straight home, and if the image of a carton of milk or a loaf of bread flitted into my head I batted it away. Takeout. We could always get takeout. I was in a crucial phase with Lisa, heading inexorably for the grimmer scenes, the disagreements—petty at first, then monumental, unbridgeable, like the day I got home from my makeup class in Calculus and found her sitting at the kitchen table with a stoner whose name I never did catch and didn’t want to know, not then or now—and I needed to get through it, to analyze it whether it hurt or not, because it was there and I had to relive it. I couldn’t help myself. I just kept picking at it like a scab.
Ultimately, this was all about Christine, of course, about when I began to fail instead of succeed, to lose instead of win. I needed Lisa to remind me of a time before that, to help me trace my missteps and assign blame, because as intoxicating as it was to relive the birds-atwitter moments with Christine, there was always something nagging at me in any given scene, some twitch of her face or a comment she threw out that should have raised flags at the time but never did. All right. Fine. I was going to go there, I was, and relive the minutiae of our relationship, the ecstasy and agony both, the moments of mindless contentment and the swelling tide of antipathy that drove us apart, but first things first, and as I fought my way home on the freeway that afternoon, all I could think about was Lisa.
In the old days, before we got the box, my daughter and I had a Friday-afternoon ritual whereby I would stop in at the Italian place down the street from the house, have a drink and chat up whoever was there, then call Katie and have her come join me for a father-daughter dinner so I could have some face-time with her, read into her and suss out her thoughts and feelings as she grew into a young woman herself, but we didn’t do that anymore. There wasn’t time. The best I could offer—lately, especially—was takeout or a microwave pizza and a limp salad choked down in the cold confines of the kitchen while we separately calculated how long we had to put up with the pretense before slipping off to relive.
There were no lights on in the house as I pulled into the driveway and that was odd, because Katie should have been home from school by now—and she hadn’t texted me or phoned to say she’d be staying late. I climbed out of the car feeling stiff all over—I needed to get more exercise, I knew that, and I resolved to do it too, as soon as I got my head above water—and as I came up the walk I saw the sad frosted artificial wreath hanging crookedly there in the center panel of the front door. Katie must have dug it out of the box of ornaments in the garage on her own initiative, to do something by way of Christmas, and that gave me pause, that stopped me right there, the thought of it, of my daughter having to make the effort all by herself. That crushed me. It did. And as I put the key in the lock and pushed the door open I knew things were going to have to change. Dinner. I’d take her out to dinner and forget about Lisa. At least for now.
“Katie?” I called. “You home?”
No response. I shrugged out of my coat and went on into the kitchen, thinking to make myself a drink. There were traces of her here, her backpack flung down on the floor, an open bag of Doritos spilling across the counter, a diet Sprite, half-full, on the breadboard. I called her name again, standing stock-still in the middle of the room and listening for the slightest hint of sound or movement as my voice echoed through the house. I was about to pull out my phone and call her when I thought of the reliving room, and it was a sinking thought, not a selfish one, because if she was in there, reliving—and she was, I knew she was—what did that say about her social life? Didn’t teenage girls go out anymore? Didn’t they gather in packs at the mall or go to movies or post things on Facebook, or, forgive me, go out on dates? Group dates, even? How else were they going to experience the inchoate beginnings of what the Relive Box people were pushing in the first place?
I shoved into the room, which was dark but for the lights of her eyes, and just stood there watching her for a long moment as I adjusted to the gloom. She sat riveted, her body present but her mind elsewhere, and if I was embarrassed—for her, and for me too, her father, invading her privacy when she was most vulnerable—the embarrassment gave way to a sorrow so oceanic I thought I would drown in it. I studied her face. Watched her smile and grimace and go cold and smile again. What could she possibly be reliving when she’d lived so little? Family vacations? Christmases past? The biannual trips to Hong Kong to be with her mother and stepfather? I couldn’t fathom it. I didn’t like it. It had to stop. I turned on the overhead light and stepped in front of the projector.
She blinked at me and she didn’t recognize me, didn’t know me at all because I was in the now and she was in the past. “Katie,” I said, “that’s enough now. Come on.” I held out my arms to her even as recognition came back into her eyes and she made a vague gesture of irritation, of pushing away.
“Katie,” I said, “let’s go out to dinner. Just the two of us. Like we used to.”
“I’m not hungry,” she said. “And it’s not fair. You can use it all you want, like day and night, but whenever I want it—” and she broke off, tears starting in her eyes.
“Come on,” I said. “It’ll be fun.”
The look she gave me was unsparing. I was trying to deflect it, trying to think of something to say, when she came up out of the chair so suddenly it startled me, and though I tried to take hold of her arm, to pull her to me whether she fought it or not, she was too quick for me. Before I could react, she was at the door, pausing only to scorch me with another glare. “I don’t believe you,” she spat, before vanishing down the hall.
I should have followed her, should have tried to make things right—or better anyway—but I didn’t. The box was right there. It had shut down when she leapt up from the chair and whatever she’d been reliving was buried back inside it, accessible to no one, though you can bet there are hackers out there right now trying to subvert the retinal-recognition feature. For a long moment I stared at the open door, fighting myself, then I went over and pulled it softly shut. I realized I didn’t need a drink or dinner either. I sat down in the chair. “Hello, Wes,” the box said. “Welcome back.”
We didn’t have a Christmas tree that year and neither of us really cared all that much, I think—if we wanted to look at spangle-draped trees we could relive holidays past, happier ones, or in my ca
se, I could go back to my childhood and relive my father’s whiskey in a glass and my mother’s long-suffering face blossoming over the greedy joy of her golden boy, her only child, tearing open his presents as a weak bleached-out California sun haunted the windows and the turkey crackled in the oven. Katie went off (reluctantly, I thought) on a skiing vacation to Mammoth with the family of her best friend, Allison, who she hardly saw anymore, not outside of school, not in the now, and I went back to Lisa, because if I was going to get to Christine in any serious way—beyond the sex, that is, beyond the holiday greetings and picture-postcard moments—Lisa was my bridge.
As soon as I’d dropped Katie at Allison’s house and exchanged a few previously scripted salutations with Allison’s grinning parents and her grinning twin brothers, I stopped at a convenience store for a case of eight-ounce bottles of spring water and the biggest box of power bars I could find and went straight home to the reliving room. The night before I’d been close to the crucial scene with Lisa, one that was as fixed in my memory as the blowup with Christine a quarter century later, but elusive as to the date and time. I’d been up all night—again—fast-forwarding, reversing, jumping locales and facial expressions, Lisa’s first piercing, the evolution of my haircut, but I hadn’t been able to pinpoint the exact moment, not yet. I set the water on the floor on my left side, the power bars on my right. “May 9, 1983,” I said, “4:00 a.m.”
The numbers flashed and then I was in darkness, zero visibility, confused as to where I was until the illuminated dial of a clock radio began to bleed through and I could make out the dim outline of myself lying in bed in the back room of that apartment with the black walls and black ceiling and black floor. Lisa was there beside me, an irregular hump in the darkness, snoring with a harsh gag and stutter. She was stoned. And drunk. Half an hour earlier she’d been in the bathroom, heaving over the toilet, and I realized I’d come too far. “Reset,” I said, “reverse ninety minutes.”
Sudden light, blinding after the darkness, and I was alone in the living room of the apartment, studying, or trying to. My hair hung limp, my muscles were barely there, but I was young and reasonably good-looking, even excusing any bias. I saw that my Black Flag T-shirt had faded to gray from too much sun and too many washings, and the book in my lap looked as familiar as something I might have been buried with in a previous life, but then this was my previous life. I watched myself turn a page, crane my neck toward the door, get up to flip over the album that was providing the soundtrack. “Reset,” I said, “fast-forward ten minutes,” and here it was, what I’d been searching for: a sudden crash, the front door flinging back, Lisa and the stoner whose name I didn’t want to know fumbling their way in, both of them as slow as syrup with the cumulative effect of downers and alcohol, and though the box didn’t have an olfactory feature, I swear I could smell the tequila on them. They’d gone clubbing, mid-week, and I couldn’t go because of finals, but Lisa could because she didn’t have finals and she didn’t have work either. I jumped up out of the chair, spilling the book, and shouted something I couldn’t quite make out, so I said, “Reset, reverse five seconds.”
“You fucker!” was what I’d shouted, and now I shouted it again prior to slapping something out of the guy’s hand, a beer bottle, and all at once I had him in a hammerlock and Lisa was beating at my back with her birdclaw fists and I was wrestling the guy out the door, cursing over the soundtrack (“Should I Stay or Should I Go,” one of those flatline ironies that almost makes you believe everything in this life’s been programmed). I saw now that he was bigger than I was, probably stronger too, but the drugs had taken the volition out of him and in the next moment he was outside the door and the three bolts were hammered home. By me. Who now turned in a rage to Lisa.
“Stop,” I said. “Freeze.” Lisa hung there, defiant and guilty at the same time, pretty, breathtakingly pretty, despite the slack mouth and drugged-out eyes. I should have left it there, should have forgotten it and gone on to those first cornucopian weeks and months and even years with Christine, but I couldn’t help myself. “Play,” I said, and Lisa raised a hand to swat at me, but she was too unsteady and knocked the lamp over instead.
“Did you fuck him?” I demanded.
There was a long pause, so long I almost fast-forwarded, and then she said, “Yeah. Yeah, I fucked him. And I’ll tell you something”—her words glutinous, the syllables coalescing on her tongue—“you’re no punk. And he is. He’s the real deal. And you? You’re, you’re—”
I should have stopped it right there.
“—you’re prissy.”
“Prissy?” I couldn’t believe it. Not then and not now.
She made a broad stoned gesture, weaving on her feet. “Anal retentive. Like who left the dishes in the sink or who didn’t take out the garbage or what about the cockroaches—”
“Stop,” I said. “Reset. June 19, 1994, 11:02 p.m.”
I was in another bedroom now, one with walls the color of cream, and I was in another bed, this time with Christine, and I’d timed the memory to the very minute, post-coital, in the afterglow, and Christine, with her soft aspirated whisper of a voice, was saying, “I love you, Wes, you know that, don’t you?”
“Stop,” I said. “Reverse five seconds.”
She said it again. And I stopped again. And reversed again. And she said it again. And again.
Time has no meaning when you’re reliving. I don’t know how long I kept it up, how long I kept surfing through those moments of Christine—not the sexual ones, but the loving ones, the companionable ones, the ordinary day-to-day moments when you could see in her eyes that she loved me more than anybody alive and was never going to stop loving me, never. Dinner at the kitchen table, any dinner, any night. Just to be there. My wife. My daughter. The way the light flooded the windows and poured liquid gold over the hardwood floors of our starter house in Canoga Park. Katie’s first birthday. Her first word (“Cake!”). The look on Christine’s face as she curled up with Katie in bed and read her Where the Wild Things Are. Her voice as she hoarsened it for Max: “I’ll eat you up!”
Enough analysis, enough hurt. I was no masochist.
At some point, I had to get up from that chair in the now and evacuate a living bladder, the house silent, spectral, unreal. I didn’t live here. I didn’t live in the now with its deadening nine-to-five job I was in danger of losing and the daughter I was failing and a wife who’d left me—and her own daughter—for Winston Chen, choreographer of martial arts movies in Hong Kong who was loving and kind and funny and not the control freak I was (Prissy, anyone? Anal retentive?). The house echoed with my footsteps, a stage set and nothing more. I went to the kitchen and dug the biggest pot I could find out from under the sink, brought it back to the reliving room and set it on the floor between my legs to save me the trouble of getting up next time around.
Time passed. Relived time and lived time too. There were two windows in the room, shades drawn so as not to interfere with the business of the moment, and sometimes a faint glow appeared around the margins of them, an effect I noticed when I was searching for a particular scene and couldn’t quite pin it down. Sometimes the glow was gone. Sometimes it wasn’t. What happened then, and I might have been two days in or three or five, I couldn’t really say, was that things began to cloy. I’d relived an exclusive diet of the transcendent, the joyful, the insouciant, the best of Christine, the best of Lisa and all the key moments of the women who came between and after, and I’d gone back to the Intermediate Algebra test, the very instant, pencil to paper, when I knew I’d scored a perfect one hundred percent, and to the time I’d squirted a ball to right field with two outs, two strikes, ninth inning and my Little League team (the Condors, yellow tees, white lettering) down by three, and watched it rise majestically over the glove of the spastic red-haired kid sucking back allergic snot and roll all the way to the wall. Triumph after triumph, goodness abounding—till it stuck in my throat.
“Reset,” I said. “January 2
, 2009, 4:30 p.m.”
I found myself in the kitchen of our second house, this house, the one we’d moved to because it was outside the L.A. city limits and had schools we felt comfortable with sending Katie to. That was what mattered: the schools. Christine and I both insisted on it, and if it lengthened our commutes, so be it. This house. The one I was reliving in now. Everything gleamed around me, counters polished, the glass of the cabinets as transparent as air because details mattered then, everything in its place whether Christine was there or not—especially if she wasn’t there, and where was she? Or where had she been? China. With her boss. On film business. Her bags were just inside the front door, where she’d dropped them forty-five minutes ago after I picked her up at the airport and we’d had our talk in the car, the talk I was going to relive when I got done here, because it was all about pain now, about reality, and this scene was the capper, the coup de grâce. You want wounds? You want to take a razor blade to the meat of your inner thigh just to see if you can still feel? Well, here it was.
Christine entered the scene now, coming down the stairs from Katie’s room, her eyes wet, or damp anyway, and her face composed. And there I was, pushing myself up from the table, my beginner’s bald spot a glint of exposed flesh under the glare of the overhead light. I spoke first. “You tell her?”
Christine was dressed in her business attire, black stockings, heels, skirt to the knee, tailored jacket. She looked exhausted, and not simply from the fifteen-hour flight but from what she’d had to tell me. And our daughter. (How I’d like to be able to relive that, to hear how she’d even broached the subject, let alone how she’d smoke-screened her own selfishness and betrayal with some specious concern for Katie’s well-being—let’s not rock the boat and you’ll be better off here with your father and your school and your teachers and it’s not the end but just the beginning, buck up, you’ll see.)
