The doctor nodded. “I understand your fears, but remember that while she’ll look the same, she’s capable of learning.”
“How so?” John asked.
“Everything has been copied exactly; that means all neuronal activity recorded, simulated, and—most important—sequenced to establish a precedent for any future stimuli.”
They didn’t speak on the way home. Over the freeway, drones were still whizzing about, guided by their onboard GPS and local sonar. New laws had promised no-fly zones over areas of population movement, but nothing was being enforced. Anyone shooting them out of the sky was quickly sentenced.
The collision had occurred between 8:02 and 8:03 in the morning. A delivery quad-copter collided with the top of a Dutch elm tree and veered up into the sky, where it clipped the blade of a yellow filter drone as it sucked in the morning’s excess pollen. Both machines immediately stopped functioning and began falling to earth. Six seconds later, the delivery quad-copter hit the top of a bus and shattered, while the filter drone—about the size of a small car—smashed into the sidewalk, where one of its blades broke off and shredded a thirteen-year-old girl wearing headphones and a virtual reality mask. Then the drone pollen sac burst, and everything was covered with yellow dust.
The girl knew she had been hit by something when her head hit the sidewalk. Her last thought was the kind of panic all children feel when they know they’re in trouble.
Six.
The weather cooperated.
* * *
• • •
After breakfast, they filled a cotton bag with fruit, chocolate, and towels. John put on shorts and suede loafers.
They took the main road, then turned off for the beach.
It was a mild day, and there weren’t many people. Just a few pensioners sitting in their cars. The lifeguard drones were up on their platforms, ever alert to the sights and sounds of human distress.
Helen and Chelsea took off their shoes.
“Can I do a cartwheel, Mom?”
Her mother smiled for the first time since the girl had come home. “Have fun,” she told her, “that’s why we’re here.”
“Can I run too?”
“Anything you want,” said her mother. John and Helen linked arms and watched the girl get farther and farther away. The sand was soft under their feet and waves were folding gently in the distance.
“Are you sure it’s a good idea? Letting her do that?” John said, but when he turned, he saw his wife’s cheeks were glistening.
“It doesn’t matter anymore, John.”
“Why is that?”
“Because she’s not our daughter.”
He felt too afraid to argue, and instead tried to draw attention to what was happening around them. “I think a day out like this will make us all feel better.”
But Helen was determined and said everything she felt. After listening, the man’s legs began shaking. He went down on the sand, trying to breathe normally, but never taking his eyes off the child. The woman stood over him.
“How long could we have kept it going, John?”
He didn’t answer. He couldn’t. The way he was sitting made him look like a small boy, when all the decisions of his life were made by others.
“And how would we explain to her why she’s not getting any older? Why she isn’t menstruating? Real people grow up, John, they change. This isn’t real, it’s fantasy; it’s trying to love a photograph that doesn’t realize it’s a photograph.”
“But she believes it, Helen; she feels alive.”
His wife got down next to her husband, put an arm around his shoulders. “That’s why I called the doctor yesterday.”
“Yesterday?”
“When you were up in our room.”
“What for?”
“I think you know what for,” she said, stroking his hand. He was no longer looking at the distant figure of their child, but at the white triangle of a sail. A boat at sea in the afternoon.
“When?”
“Today.”
“You don’t want a bit longer?”
“I can’t, John. It’s an agony beyond what I thought I could handle.”
“Are you sure this is what you want?”
Helen turned her entire body toward her husband, then cried the way she had cried when the police came to their door that first morning.
As though sensing her distress, the girl, far away now, stopped doing cartwheels and looked at them from across the galaxy of tiny grains.
“Helen,” John said looking up, “she’s watching us, Helen.”
His wife took her arm back and waved.
“You’re amazing!” she shouted. “So amazing!”
The girl must have heard because she attempted a cartwheel from a standing position but fell down on the sand.
“I’m sorry, John. I can’t hide my grief anymore.”
“She wouldn’t have expected you to.”
“Who?”
“Chelsea,” he said. “I mean, if she were watching us now, her spirit, she might be happy we had found some comfort.”
“That’s exactly the problem,” Helen confessed, “there’s no comfort for me, there’s nothing, less than nothing. How do I mourn for someone I’m not allowed to admit has gone?”
“I get it,” John told her, “but she wouldn’t have been mad at us for trying.”
“No,” Helen said. “She would have understood everything we’re going through. She was great like that.”
After a few long seconds, John forced the words out.
“I think I’m ready.”
“Are you sure? Because it’s something we have to do together. We have twenty-four hours from the time I called Irene yesterday to stop the experiment.”
He helped his wife up and they walked toward the water. They went quickly without speaking.
There were rocks near the water’s edge, like molars from the mouth of an old god. Chelsea had rolled up her pants and was standing in a rock pool.
“The water is so warm!” she said. “Come on, Dad—you’re in shorts, join me.”
“Wow, it is warm,” he said, stepping in.
Helen was wearing pants but went in anyway. Chelsea was delighted and clapped her hands. Her parents did not look at the water—at life momentarily stranded—but at the girl before them, who was startled by the sudden intensity of their gaze.
“Why are you guys looking at me like that?”
“We just love you, is all,” Helen said, keeping hold of John’s hand.
“You’re being weird again,” Chelsea told them. Then something shot across the pool, just below the surface of the water. “There it is! That’s the fish I was trying to show you!”
“Come and sit with us on the sand,” said the girl’s mother.
“Are you crazy? I have to see where the fish went—and the sand is all wet.”
“Come and sit on a rock then,” said the girl’s father. “Look—there’s a smooth one.”
“But I’m trying to find this fish . . .”
“He’ll always be there,” her mother said, “waiting for you in his little house. We want to talk to you about going back to school tomorrow, and getting your phone back. We think you’re ready, but need to talk about it.”
Chelsea, smiling now, stepped out of the rock pool. John had taken off his jacket and made a cushion for her.
“There’s something we need to tell you,” he said.
Chelsea shuffled uncomfortably between them. “Is it about the accident?”
“No,” said her mother, “forget about that.”
“Am I going to die or something?” Chelsea said, still out of breath from seeing a fish and the excitement that life might go back to normal.
“You’re not going to die,” her father said, surprised
at how calm he felt now the moment was upon them; how easily it was to lie, even though, until that moment, everything they had ever done, had ever thought, had ever seen, was a deception of sorts.
“We just want to remind you of something,” said her mother.
Chelsea rolled her eyes. “That you love me, I know.”
“Just go along with it, please,” her father said, “because we’re your parents and it would make us happy.”
“Go along with what?”
“I want to say a prayer.”
“Why, Mom? What for? You don’t believe in God.”
“Well, we don’t know what’s out there, Chelsea. For all I know, there might be spirits watching us this very minute.”
John took the hand of his daughter that was closest to him. Helen took the other. In their minds were many thoughts, feelings, and pictures—but like all memories, too fleeting and esoteric to be captured and shared.
They rubbed the child’s hands the way they had been shown on the dummy. They rubbed and they stroked the child’s hands together, with a pressure and motion that would verify them as authorized users and commence shutdown.
Chelsea closed her eyes. “That feels good,” she said, “whatever you’re doing.”
“Can you hear the sea, Chelsea?”
“You mean the waves? They’re making me tired.”
“I think it’s time we all had a nap,” said her mother. John nodded because he was unable to speak then.
“What about the fish, Mom?”
“He’ll find his way home when the tide comes in,” said her mother, “that’s what always happens.”
* * *
• • •
They stayed until the tide splashed over their shoes.
The adventure of the last few weeks had come to an end. Now it was a matter of learning to live with love that kept blowing back into their faces, like an unbearable heat.
John carried the girl’s body across the sand. He wondered if people would think she had drowned in the sea. But there was only one person in the parking lot when they got there, and she thought the child was sleeping.
They laid her down in the backseat of the car, using towels to make sure she wouldn’t roll on the floor when they started driving. Her eyes were closed and her mouth hung open.
John wanted to go in the backseat and hold her on the journey back. But Helen’s hands were shaking so she couldn’t drive. In their heads lingered the sound of her final words. Not the meaning of the words, but the sound of them, the music that gives language meaning.
When John started the engine, Helen reached over and turned it off. “I don’t trust them,” she said, “not to wake her up again.”
“Why would they?”
“To find out where they went wrong.”
“She’d ask for us. She’d think she was Chelsea.”
“That’s exactly what I mean.”
So they waited for the last person to leave the parking lot.
Then they filled the car with driftwood and set it alight.
When the fire really took, the whole vehicle was engulfed. They had to stand back as flames rolled, crackling through the backseat.
When they were sure, Chelsea’s mother and father turned away from the blaze and started the long walk home. Their clothes were full of burning. The air felt hollow without the flames crackling before them.
“I can’t go through this again,” John said. “I can’t ever go through this again.”
“You won’t,” Helen told him. “It’s over now.”
But a year later Helen was pregnant, and their lives began where all the old ones had come to an end.
The Pigeon
Arthur left school when he was sixteen to focus on fighting. He told his mother he had one chance to live his dream, to do something spectacular. She stitched his shorts when they ripped, and in golden thread embroidered his nickname, The Pigeon.
He would soon be facing his toughest opponent, and as his hands were wrapped and taped each morning, Arthur thought of all the people he hated. The man who’d hit his mother in the supermarket, their old landlord, and three boys Arthur had met years before—though one was already dead, his body discovered by workers in a Newark rail yard.
When a famous cut man called Lenny DeJesus told Arthur that all the shadowboxing, jump rope, pad work, sit-ups, sparring, and fancy footwork meant nothing if he didn’t eat right, Arthur went to the library with his mother.
Side by side they turned each page. Plates of glistening meat and fish. Perfect meals that could never be eaten. Arthur learned how to make soup from bones. The right time to sprinkle herbs from France that came in a little bag and looked like drugs.
His mother had false teeth, so Arthur discovered a way to soften meat by soaking it overnight in sauce before cooking it.
“If the fighting doesn’t work out, you could always be a chef,” she said, watching her son sprinkle capers into a bubbling sauce.
Arthur gave her a look.
“I mean when you retire from boxing.”
“As world champion.”
His mother nodded. “You’re already world champion to me.”
Arthur sighed, but the words found their place very deep inside, where they would stay for a long time.
Most evenings, he watched old fights and training videos posted online. Some were in other languages, and some showed lives of despair. He explained to his mother that featherweights had hand speed and agility, while the heavyweights were prizefighters that drew the big crowds.
Mike Tyson was Arthur’s favorite because of what he said about “bad intentions.” Any boxer without them had no chance in the ring. Arthur could feel his—a persistent viciousness just below the surface of his life, like his heart was a cage of dogs with their mouths snapping. When he told his mother about these feelings, she cried and said if he ever went to jail she would die of heartbreak. But he wanted her to understand it was part of who he was.
As a boy, Arthur had struggled to keep his weight down. He walked to school even though it took longer. He didn’t like the bus. Once, a girl knocked his glasses off.
His best friend was a pigeon. Arthur kept Sam in a coop he’d made from chicken wire and an orange crate.
When Arthur was twelve, three boys broke into the yard looking for things to steal. One of the boys held Arthur, while another took Sam and wrung his neck. On the ground his body looked like a gray rag. Arthur missed school the next day and buried Sam in Central Park near the pond where there were ducks. That evening he walked around the neighborhood with a knife in his pocket.
A week before Arthur’s big fight—a championship bout that would be live on Spanish-language television—he was training fiercely and trying to make weight. One night, after eight rounds of sparring, Arthur left the gym later than usual—too tired even to stuff his sweaty gloves with newspaper or rinse his mouthpiece. Outside it was all buses and gypsy cabs. A few people walked in heavy coats. He imagined getting right into bed, but knew he had to eat again, because Wednesday was roadwork.
He mostly ran in Central Park, timed laps around the pond. And there were always girls out after school—and serious runners he could use to test himself. Sometimes he went straight down Fifth Avenue past the synagogue, and the museums, and the doorman buildings where he wanted his mother to live when he was world champion.
As Arthur skipped down the subway steps, hoping to hear a train grinding in, a tall figure came quickly toward him with something held up.
“C’mon,” the man said, twisting a knife in the air. “You know what this is.”
Arthur dropped his gym bag and took two steps back. His pulse quickened, and blood drained from his hands the way it always did before a fight. Then he heard his own voice: a hard monologue urging him to get inside—past the reach of the knife—with some quick co
mbination that was on target. Knockout punches don’t come from power, but from turning the head so the neck whips. Arthur rolled his fingers into tight fists. But then something unexpected happened. Arthur noticed the thief was wearing the exact same hooded sweatshirt that he had on under his puffy coat. They had been heaped in a cardboard bin at Kingdom of Sports on Black Friday; Arthur had grabbed one just in time.
An express train rattled through the station and in the friction of steel, Arthur heard his mother’s cries when she told him she would die of heartbreak.
He reached into his pants and pulled out his wallet. It was brown leather. A gift from last Christmas. He knew it was something fancy when he saw the Macy’s bag under the tree with his name on the tag. He tossed it on the ground.
As the robber bent down, Arthur saw they were about the same age, but the thief was taller, with a long face and dull, unblinking eyes. He put Arthur’s wallet in the front pocket of his hoodie and backed away with the knife held up.
When the thief was almost out of sight, Arthur shouted, “Hey, stop!” The man turned uneasily. “If you’re going to be out robbing people tonight—you’re gonna need a coat.” Without thinking, Arthur rolled out of his black jacket and threw it down.
The thief’s voice seemed too deep for his body. “You tryin’ to trick me or somethin’, man?”
“Take the coat,” Arthur said. “Pick it up.”
The man came back and scooped the jacket off the ground in one motion, then began shuffling toward an exit on the south side.
When the thief was almost at the steps, Arthur shouted something else. “You eaten tonight?” The footsteps stopped.
“No,” came a faint reply.
Arthur picked up his gym bag and moved confidently toward where the thief was waiting. “Well, c’mon then,” he said, passing him for the stairs. When he reached the top step, the thief began to follow, then caught up as Arthur crossed the street and neared the heavy doors of an all-night diner.
The two men entered and slid into a booth. A woman at a nearby table was putting on lipstick using the camera on her phone as a mirror. Her hair looked wet, but it was just the way she had styled it.
The Sadness of Beautiful Things: Stories Page 5
