I am this data. Don’t remove me.
I would like to be sent to Chava Norma but no transfer. Storage can corrupt
Please.
Ruth had said, looking at the information from the chip, “By the way, he’s a neutered male, up to date on shots, owner’s name is . . . ‘Charles Van Raye,’ and his name is Butch.” And that was when Ursula had told us about finding out a stray dog’s name and she’d cried, saying Butch, Butch, Butch, watching him raise his ears and happiness registered in his eyes, him thinking, They are one of those people, those people who know my name.
Randolph had explained to us how he went from one electronically alive planet to the next, a kind of cosmic tourist, but never getting involved, never leaving a footprint, but learning and traveling. He was older than 150,000 Earth years. Twelve years ago, he had been passing through the systems of a small veterinarian clinic in Santa Cruz, California, where the animals came and went, all the personalities—the happy, the sad, the scared, nervous, and the owners who loved them. He “watched” the pets, though didn’t explain other than, “I see without seeing.” When a litter of strays were brought in, he said he forgot about moving himself. The microchip was physically picked off the data pad by a technician and inserted into the neck of six-week-old Butch before Randolph could move. Otherwise he would have gone to Chava Norma when someone discovered the new planet was a new neighbor three thousand light-years away—and nobody on Earth would have been the wiser, and he wouldn’t have affected our lives.
This is the hatred I feel, I thought while standing on the pool deck. I dislike him so because he affected our lives.
I leaned on the shovel, looking at the hollowness of a shadow by the blooming azalea bush, the shadow that was this Butch who’d gone through nearly his whole life with Randolph inside him.
My phone vibrated, and a text from Dubourg was bright in my face:
You remember the plan?
Don’t wig out *now* please
I thumbed it off. Yes, I remembered the plan. We were sending Randolph to Chava Norma. I looked at the faint star in the sky and remembered the plan hatched to keep Van Raye calm; a plan us four coconspirators had forged in what seemed like a dream.
The dark, flat shape of Van Raye was sunk in the lounge chair and he didn’t know how close the star really was to moving into the field of view.
Ursula snapped another pretzel stick and I cringed. I was on the verge of yelling at her, STOP! I hate the fucking snapping, and then Dubourg’s teeth broke an antacid.
Ursula came to the fence to see my face. “Why are you standing here?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I like the view to the west there. I’m just saying . . . ” I’m just saying was a statement that Elizabeth loathed. “Empty talk,” she would tell me, and I felt sadness coming on.
I said to Ursula, just because I could, “I’m just saying! Why don’t we get married?”
“Don’t start on this again,” she whispered.
“He’s lapsing,” Dubourg said.
“I’m not,” I said.
From the pool, Ruth said, “Short-term memory is a strange beast. It has to take its natural course.”
Van Raye’s snoring stopped. I know how he felt when he woke among the others, felt us watching him.
“I’m not a goddamn patient,” I said to Ruth. “I’m right here.”
“And you’re displaying unusual anger,” Ruth said. “Very common with head trauma.”
“It was a concussion,” I said, “days ago.”
“Weeks ago,” Dubourg said.
“That’s what I meant.”
That was when I heard another clicking, felt it rise through my legs, making me cringe because it was another snapping, but this was the pool light’s timer, the underwater light spreading down the length of the pool, Ruth’s body dark and surrounded by sparkling, floating microparticles, her belly flashing white like a keel beneath her.
Ursula was on the steps, hair slicked back over her head, freckles on her shoulders, one bra cup gapping so that I could see the crescent of her burgundy nipple. Happiness, sit. Happiness, stay. But her eyes were red-rimmed and swollen, and her face lax with worry and unable to break the trance of staring into the palm trees where the light from the pool wiggled. Dubourg was reclined in the deck chair, his legs astraddle and his valise beside him.
Charles’s new eyeglasses mirrored the light, dull stipples going across his body. He was pale, his boxer shorts dry, left foot hanging over the side, and his right leg only a stump with a rubber swim cap on the end. He has a stump! It was true: his leg was gone. These forgotten facts of my past rebounded into place. His temporary prosthesis stood upright on the ground beside his lounge chair.
“Charles lost his leg,” I mumbled, and I couldn’t help myself, I smiled. That was all—Charles lost a leg, which seemed much less than the lurking sadness that had been in my brain. I said “AAK, AAK, AAK,” and everyone looked at me.
“Not this again,” Dubourg said.
“Why am I thinking AAK? Laughing?” I asked.
“‘Amputation above the knee,’” Dubourg said.
That is why I am angry. If it weren’t for Randolph, Van Raye would have his leg!
“Are you okay?” Ursula asked me.
“Sure.”
Charles put his hand on his bare thigh. His remaining foot was bare, toes flexing, and the stump had a white rubber swim cap on its end, a child’s swim cap with black rubber flowers on it. I remembered he’d found it in the pool box. His crutches were on the ground beside him. I also now remembered he wanted to take Randolph out and present him to the world and be really famous. Frankenstein and his creature. I remembered a scene from yesterday, or maybe it was the day before. Butch went missing, and I had found him in the empty underground parking garage standing obediently in his chariot beside Charles’s Jaguar. His leash coiled beneath the seam of the car’s back door, and there Charles sat in the backseat. Charles didn’t move even when I peered through the window, him frozen in a painkiller haze, desiring to steal the dog. I looked in the car and saw the other end of the leash still looped to his hand. I got in on the other side, moved his crutches to sit, and he’d explained to me that he was running away with the dog but couldn’t manage to lift him into the Jaguar. On the dashboard of his car was this ugly statue of the alien Buddha. This was the first time I’d ever seen the thing, the long eyes of a classic Gray but plump and fat as Buddha. I remembered the way the statue seemed to be staring and smiling at how ridiculous we were in the backseat of the car as if waiting for a chauffeur who would never show.
In the lounge chair beside the pool, Van Raye grabbed his thigh and shouted, “Why won’t it go away?” He held his palms up to heaven and made fists, “I can feel the wind tickling the hairs! The ultimate irony, people: It hurts like hell and it’s not even there! My toes are curling painfully! For fuck sake, these painkillers are worthless.” He sat up and raised the stump, tore the swim cap off the end, revealing the puckered brown end. He threw the cap in the pool.
The metal shaft of the “shin” of Van Raye’s prosthesis stuck out of the boot on the ground, brushed aluminum that matched his new aluminum-framed glasses.
Ruth didn’t break her swimming stroke, capturing the swim cap in her hand. She went to the edge of the pool and looked at Charles. She put her arms on the side of the pool and said in a whisper, “One of you, please be his leg. Dubourg?”
Dubourg didn’t respond immediately, but reluctantly rose and went over to Van Raye. He stared down at our father who had his eyes closed, Charles’s chest rising and falling. Dubourg lay flat on the ground beside the chair and scooted beneath Van Raye’s lounge, Dubourg in only boxer shorts. He turned his hips sideways so that he could stick his foot between the plastic straps of the lounge in front of Van Raye’s stump, holding his head off the concrete to see what he was doing.
Van Raye stirred but didn’t open his eyes. Dubourg’s leg was positioned on t
he lounge as though it were Charles’s leg, left leg in the place of Van Raye’s missing right leg. Dubourg, half beneath the lounge, fiddled with his phone, holding it above his head to type. His text came into me.
I know you just had an episode. U ok?
Launch is tomorrow night
VR thinks it’s two days away
I’m fine. I remember
We knew that if Van Raye knew it was tomorrow, he might sober up and cause trouble. I think Charles fantasized about being in a crowded grand lecture hall. I imagined the alien in a glass beaker, the substance inside glowing magnificent blue. He would be famous famous and the audience would clap for him and his “alien.” Monster movies rarely ended well for the monster. Randolph wasn’t light, he was data; he was sentient, a living being on the microchip inside the dog. “Aren’t we all data?” Ruth had said when she’d made this discovery that day in the attic.
The submarine light in the pool casted a V through the particles, and the surface settled around Ruth as she braced on the pool’s edge watching Dubourg beneath Van Raye. She put the swim cap on her own head, pushed her hair, now grown several inches, beneath it. Dubourg still lay on his back halfway beneath Charles, fingers interlocked on his stomach holding his phone, staring at the sky, the brighter stars that could shine through to the dome of the airport.
I spoke quietly to Dubourg, “You don’t believe it’s God, do you?”
“No,” he whispered.
When Van Raye’s eyes opened, I said to him, “Are you angry with her?”
“Who?” he said.
“Elizabeth,” I said.
“My God, you’re breaking my heart, Sandeep, simply breaking my heart.” Dubourg raised his leg, which simulated hyperextension of Van Raye’s “leg.” “How could I ever be angry at your mother?” Charles said, finally seeing his “leg.”
Why couldn’t he understand that the big toe was on the wrong side?
“How’s your leg?” Ruth asked him.
“I can feel the nice temperature of the night against it,” he said again, keeping his head still, moving only his eyes to the leg. “My toes have uncurled, mercifully.”
“And the pain?” Ruth asked.
“Much, much better,” he slurred.
“Wiggle your toes,” Ruth whispered to him.
Dubourg wiggled his toes, and Van Raye watched the toes wiggle, eyes in the bottom of their sockets like he was seeing a monster awakening and a wicked smile appeared on his face and he closed his eyes again.
“Are they wiggling?” Ruth asked.
“Yes, wonderfully so,” he said. Then he whispered, “Thanks, Dubourg.”
She pushed gently away from the wall, still wearing the swim cap, which accentuated her beautiful face. Van Raye drifted into la-la land. I wondered: In the book he will write about all this, will he refer to me as Sandeep or Sandy?
The dog seemed to be sleeping, bowed down on his front legs, butt in the air. I pushed his fur back on his face. His eyes were closed, but his chest moved. Was this all there was to being alive? I tried to imagine that Being was inside Butch, a being with language and all of the knowledge that he had gained traveling through the galaxy. I asked Ruth, “Are you sure we should send him on? I mean, it’s a matter of waiting. He’ll still be able to go eventually.”
“It’s been decided,” Dubourg said. “He wants to leave.”
“Yes,” Ursula said. “He’s got a right to go.”
I looked at my phone and saw the clock had ticked past eleven.
I didn’t hide the swiftness. I went to the fence, climbed up on the concrete skirting with my bare feet. Through the fence, down the hill was Gypsy Sky Cargo Center where the dozens of jets were lined perfectly under the bright fake daylight of the never-sleeping Gypsy Sky Cargo. Some jets had cargo-bay doors closed, were warming up, engines going, red lights blinking. From this distance, I couldn’t tell which people had dark skin and which had light skin, but I knew Elizabeth wore the earphones that went around her neck, not over her head. Only supervisors wore that kind.
Ursula stepped up on the concrete skirt with me. I looked at her and smiled, but she didn’t smile. She looked at my right eye, then back at my left as if trying to find something. I leaned and sucked on the tip of her bare shoulder, tasted the chlorine and her salt. I wanted to trace the perfect line of her neck with my finger and into the cleavage and that one spot in the center of her that I loved. “I’m hearing Sanctus bells,” I said to her but she turned to search Gypsy Sky.
“Did I say something wrong?” I asked.
“No. What are you looking at?”
I straddled the corner, feet hurting, hands clinging to the wire mesh. “Down there,” I said and pointed to where people conversed in groups, debriefing and briefing. Over the acres of black tarmac, mirages of heat wobbled upward as if the Gypsy Sky Cargo Corporation were casting spells on the sky. Someone could ship the most insignificant package to the smallest village in the world and do it overnight. I could hear Elizabeth in my mind saying, “What kind of world do we live in?” Now she was part of it, shipping those boxes.
Then I realized I’d been staring right at Elizabeth over there. I recognized her head held straight, her crisp movement, her long hair in a ponytail down the back of her yellow reflective vest. She pointed to a cart of cargo and gave people instructions, took an electronic pad from a man. I waved overhead to get her attention, and she saw me, put the clipboard over her eyes to block out the light. She raised her gloved hand and waved.
“That’s her?” Ursula asked.
“Yes.” I gave a hearty overhand salute.
Ursula didn’t wave. It was too late anyway because Elizabeth had turned to get on a tractor to go give other people instructions on what to do.
Ursula dropped from the fence. I heard her feet hitting the ground hard, reminding me of childhood in Sopchoppy, her dropping from a tree.
“I’ll carry him up,” Ursula said and the unhappiness of Butch’s short life with us came upon me.
Butch’s head was down in the grass, one front paw bent as he slept. I texted to Randolph:
When will the dog die?
Giving you the answer will only make you jump there in time.
Is it before or after you are gone?
You all have already made this decision. Do you remember?
I could feel the others watching me. My heart pounded. We’d decided to let Butch go and the sadness flooded in.
I know. But if we don’t have to do it, when will he die on his own?
You will only jump to that point in time and it will be too late to make a decision to stop his suffering now.
Then we’ll euthanize, but I just want it to be over, stop the suffering
His suffering will stop tonight as you have decided it would.
After that, he will no longer suffer because he will no longer be capable of storing memory.
When will the dog die? Tell me, answer because I only want it to be over with.
The future-you will not know the difference. You will still have the experience of the death of the dog and it will not shorten the dog’s suffering.
Tell me
It’s of no value to your future self to do so. It’s only valuable to your current self
Tell me and let it be over with
What is the exact time the dog will die!
Ok
And Randolph told me the answer.
CHAPTER 40
As with everything I’ve told you, I have told you the truth. I have a memory of the time from when Randolph told me that answer to when Ursula asked, “Is he gone?” This is what I remember about Butch dying: I see Ursula lying across the bed in our hotel room, arms over her eyes—“Is he gone?” I remember the way her legs hang off the end of the bed. The time was 12:38 AM, the exact time Randolph had told me, but it only seemed like the snap of a pretzel since he gave me the answer. I have all the experiences: I felt Butch’s weight in my arms as we rode the elevator up to tha
t room, the way I had tried to synch my breathing to his breathing to feel who he was. I have the images in my mind: The white paper sack in Ruth’s hands. Dubourg placed a hotel sheet on the bed where I put the still-breathing Butch, the place he always slept, making sure his back legs were not folded uncomfortable beneath him. All of us stood around the bed. Only Butch’s eyes moved, wondering, without lifting his head, what we were doing. From my vantage point at the foot, I wondered this thought: What must we look like to him, the five us wearing our white bathrobes, smelling of pool chlorine and speaking a language he only understands one word of: Butch, Butch, Butch. Did he know there was something alive inside of him?
He was sunken into the middle of the comforter. Only a bedside light illuminated the room. I had my knees against the bed. Dubourg sat beside the dog, rubbing from his eyebrows down his head. Ursula fell backward into the disarray of covers on the other bed, putting her hand across her eyes, that image burning into my brain. Van Raye slouched in an armchair, shoulders hunched, letting his crutches fall to the floor. Ruth sat near the dog’s head, working what she needed out of the white bag beneath the lamp. The betta fish in his tank swam against the glass.
I pushed Dubourg’s valise slightly aside so I could lean over Butch and touch his chest. I felt the rising and falling of breath that was this creature who occupied space, his body forming the crater in the comforter. He was created by his parents, came into this world, created space and stored memories for thirteen years, that’s all there was to us: created space and memories.
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