The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014

by Daniel Handler

  I glance at Charlotte, asleep. Still, I whisper, “Mr. President, did you and the First Lady ever talk about the future, about these kinds of possibilities?”

  I wonder if the First Lady was the one to turn off the machine.

  The President smiles. “The First Lady and I have a wonderful relationship. We share everything.”

  “But were there instructions? Did you two make a plan?”

  His voice lowers, becomes sonorous. “Are you asking about bonds of matrimony?”

  I pause. “Yes.”

  “In this regard,” he says, “our only duty is to be of service, in any way we can.”

  My mind ponders the ways in which I might have to be of service to Charlotte.

  The President then looks into the distance, like a flag is waving there.

  “I’m the President of the United States,” he says, “and I approved this message.”

  That’s when I know our conversation is over. When I reach to turn off the iProjector, the President looks me squarely in the eye, a coincidence of perspective, I guess. We regard one another, his eyes deep and melancholy, and my finger hesitates at the switch.

  “Seek your inner resolve,” he tells me.

  How did we get to this place? Can you tell a story that doesn’t begin, it’s just suddenly happening? The woman you love gets the flu. Her fingers tingle, her legs go rubbery. In the morning, she can’t grip a coffee cup. What finally gets her to the hospital is the need to pee. She has got to pee, she’s dying to pee, but the paralysis has begun: The bladder can no longer hear the brain. After an ER doc inserts a Foley catheter, you learn new words—axon, areflexia, dendrite, myelin, ascending peripheral polyneuropathy.

  Charlotte says she’s filled with “noise.” Inside her is a “storm.”

  The doctor has a big needle. He tells Charlotte to get on the gurney. Charlotte’s scared to get on the gurney. She’s scared she won’t ever get up again. “Please, honey,” you say. “Get on the gurney.” Soon, you behold the glycerin glow of a fresh-drawn vial of spinal fluid. And she’s right. She doesn’t get up again.

  To begin plasmapheresis, a femoral stent must be placed. This is performed by a tattooed phlebotomist whose headphones buzz with Rage Against the Machine.

  Next comes high-dose immunoglobulin therapy.

  The doctors mention, casually, the word ventilator.

  Charlotte’s mother arrives. She brings her cello. She’s an expert on the Siege of Leningrad. She has written a book on the topic. When the coma is induced, she fills the neuro ward with the saddest sounds ever conceived. For seven days, there is nothing but the swish of vent baffles, the trill of vital monitors, and Shostakovich, Shostakovich, Shostakovich. No one will tell her to stop. Nervous nurses appear and disappear, whispering in Tagalog.

  Two months of physical therapy in Santa Clara. Here are dunk tanks, sonar stimulators, exoskeletal treadmills. Charlotte is fitted for AFOs and a head array. She becomes the person in the room who makes the victims of other afflictions feel better about their fate. She does not make progress, she’s not a “soldier” or a “champ” or a “trouper.”

  Charlotte convinces herself that I will leave her for a woman who “works.” In the rehab ward, she screams at me to get a vasectomy so this other woman and myself will suffer a barren future. My refusal becomes proof of this other woman and our plans.

  To soothe her, I read aloud Joseph Heller’s memoir about contracting Guillain-Barré syndrome. The book was supposed to make us feel better. Instead, it chronicles how great Heller’s friends are, how high Heller’s spirits are, how Heller leaves his wife to marry the beautiful nurse who tends to him. And for Charlotte, the book’s ending is particularly painful: Joseph Heller gets better.

  We tumble into a well of despair, which is narrow and deep, a place that seals us off, where we only hear our own voices, and we exist in a fluid that’s clear and black. Everything is in the well with us—careers, goals, travel, parenthood—so close that we can drown them to save ourselves.

  A doctor wants to float Charlotte on a raft of antidepressants. She will take no pills. Lightheartedly, the doctor says, “That’s what IVs are for.” Charlotte levels her eyes and says, “Next doctor, please.”

  The next doctor recommends discharge.

  Home is unexpectedly surreal. Amid familiar surroundings, the impossibility of normal life is amplified. But the cat is happy, so happy to have Charlotte home that it spends an entire night sprawled across Charlotte’s throat, across her tracheal incision. Good-bye, cat! There comes, strangely, a vaudevillian week of slaphappy humor, where bedpans and withering limbs are suddenly funny, where a booger that can’t be picked is hilarious, where everyday items drip with bizarre humor—I put a hat on Charlotte and we laugh and laugh. She stares in bafflement at the sight of a bra. There are lots of cat jokes!

  This period passes, normal life returns. The cap to a hypodermic needle, dropped unnoticed into the sheets, irritates a hole into Charlotte’s back. While I am in the garage, Charlotte watches a spider slowly descend from the ceiling on a single thread. Charlotte tries to blow it away. She blows and blows, but the spider disappears into her hair.

  Still to be described are tests, tantrums, and silent treatments. To come are the discoveries of Kurt Cobain, marijuana, and ever shorter haircuts. Of these times, there is only one moment I must relate. It was a normal night. I was beside Charlotte in the mechanical bed, holding up her magazine and turning the pages, so I wasn’t really facing her.

  She said, “You don’t know how bad I want to get out of this bed.”

  Her voice was quiet, uninflected. She’d said similar things a thousand times.

  I flipped the page and laughed at a picture whose caption read, “Stars are just like us!”

  “I’d do anything to escape,” she said.

  Charlotte’s job was to explicate the intricate backstories of celebrities, showing me how their narratives rightfully adorned the Sistine Chapel of American culture. My job was to make fun of the celebrities and pretend that I hadn’t also become caught up in their love battles and breakups.

  “But I could never do that to you,” she said.

  “Do what?” I asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “What are you talking about, what’s going through your head?”

  I turned to look at her. She was inches away.

  “Except for how it would hurt you,” she said, “I would get away.”

  “Get away where?”

  “From here.”

  Neither of us had spoken of the promise since the night it was exacted. I’d tried to pretend the promise didn’t exist, but it existed—it existed.

  “Face it, you’re stuck with me,” I said, forcing a smile. “We’re destined, we’re fated to be together. And soon you’ll be better, things will be normal again.”

  “My entire life is this pillow.”

  “That’s not true. You’ve got your friends and family. And you’ve got technology. The whole world is at your fingertips.”

  By friends I meant her nurses and physical therapists. By family I meant her distant and brooding mother. It didn’t matter: Charlotte was too disengaged to even point out her nonfunctional fingers and their nonfeeling tips.

  She rolled her head to the side and stared at the safety rail.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I would never do that to you.”

  In the morning before the nurses arrive, I open the curtains and study the drone in the early light. Most of the stealth and propulsion parts are off the shelf, but the processors are new to me, half hidden by a Kevlar shield. To get the drone to talk, to get some forensics on who sent it my way, I’ll have to get my hands on the hash reader from work.

  When Charlotte wakes, I prop her head and massage her legs. It’s our morning routine.

  “Let’s generate those Schwann cells,” I tell her toes. “It’s time for Charlotte’s body to start producing some myelin membranes.”

  “Look
who’s Mr. Brightside,” she says. “You must have been talking to the President. Isn’t that why you talk to him, to get all inspired? To see the silver lining?”

  I lift her right foot and rub her Achilles tendon. Last week, Charlotte failed a big test, the DTRE, which measures deep tendon response and signals the beginning of recovery. “Don’t worry,” the doctor told us. “I know of another patient that also took nine months to respond, and he managed a full recovery.” I asked if we could contact this patient, to know what he went through, to help us see what’s ahead. The doctor informed us this patient was attended to in France, in the year 1918.

  After the doctor left, I went into the garage and started making the President. A psychologist would probably say the reason I created him had to do with the promise I made Charlotte and the fact that the President also had a relationship with the person who took his life. But it’s simpler than that: I just needed to save somebody, and with the President, it didn’t matter that it was too late.

  I tap Charlotte’s patella but there’s no response. “Any pain?”

  “So what did the President say?”

  “Which president?”

  “The dead one,” she says.

  I articulate the plantar fascia. “How about this?”

  “Feels like a spray of cool diamonds,” she says. “Come on, I know you talked to him.”

  It’s going to be one of her bad days, I can tell.

  “Let me guess,” Charlotte says. “The President told you to move to the South Pacific to take up painting. That’s uplifting, isn’t it?”

  I don’t say anything.

  “You’d take me with you, right? I could be your assistant. I’d hold your palette in my teeth. If you need a model, I specialize in reclining nudes.”

  She’s thirsty. We use a neti pot as a bedside water cup. Charlotte, lying down, can drink from the spout. While she sips, I say, “If you must know, the President told me to locate my inner resolve.”

  “Inner resolve,” she says. “I could use some help tracking down mine.”

  “You have more resolve than anyone I know.”

  “Jesus, you’re sunny. Don’t you know what’s going on? Don’t you see that I’m about to spend the rest of my life like this?”

  “Pace yourself, darling. The day’s only a couple minutes old.”

  “I know,” she says. “I’m supposed to have reached a stage of enlightened acceptance or something. You think I like it that the only person I have to get mad at is you? I know it’s not right—you’re the one thing I love in this world.”

  “You love Kurt Cobain.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Too bad he’s not alive for you to get mad at.”

  “Man, I would let him have it,” she says.

  We hear Hector, the morning nurse, pull up outside—he drives an old car with a combustion engine.

  “I have to grab something from work,” I tell her. “But I’ll be back.”

  “Promise me something,” she says.

  “No.”

  “Come on. If you do, I’ll release you from the other promise.”

  Far from being scary, the mention of the promise is strangely relieving.

  Still, I shake my head. I know she doesn’t mean it—she’ll never release me.

  She says, “Will you please agree to be straight with me? You don’t have to make me feel better, you don’t have to be all fake and optimistic. It doesn’t help.”

  “I am optimistic.”

  “You shouldn’t be,” she says. “Pretending, that’s what killed Kurt Cobain.”

  I think it was the shotgun he pointed at his head, but I don’t say that.

  I only know one line from Nirvana. I karaoke it to Charlotte:

  “With the lights on,” I sing, “she’s less dangerous.”

  She rolls her eyes. “You got it wrong,” she says. But she smiles.

  I try to encourage this. “What, I don’t get points for trying?”

  “You don’t hear that?” Charlotte asks.

  “Hear what?”

  “That’s the sound of me clapping.”

  “I give up,” I say and make for the door.

  “Bed, incline,” Charlotte tells her remote. Her torso slowly rises. It’s time to start her day.

  I take the 101 freeway south toward Mountain View, where I write code at a company called Reputation Curator. Basically the company bribes/threatens Yelpers and Facebookers to retract negative comments about dodgy lawyers and incompetent dentists. The work is labor intensive, so I was hired to write a program that would sweep the Web to construct client profiles. Creating the President was only a step away.

  In the vehicle next to me is a woman with her iProjector on the passenger seat, and she’s having an animated discussion with the President as she drives. At the next overpass, I see an older black man in a tan jacket, looking down at the traffic. Standing next to him is the President. They’re not speaking, just standing together, silently watching the cars go by.

  A black car, driverless, begins pacing me in the next lane. When I speed up, it speeds up. Through its smoked windows, I can see it has no cargo—there’s nothing inside but a battery array big enough to ensure no car could outrun it. Even though I like driving, even though it relaxes me, I shift to automatic and dart into the Google lane, where I let go of the wheel and sign on to the Web for the first time since I released the President a week ago. I log in and discover that fourteen million people have downloaded the President. I also have seven hundred new messages. The first is from the dude who started Facebook, and it is not spam—he wants to buy me a burrito and talk about the future. I skip to the latest message, which is from Charlotte: “I don’t mean to be mean. I lost my feeling, remember? I’ll get it back. I’m trying, really, I am.”

  I see the President again, on the lawn of a Korean church. The minister has placed an iProjector on a chair, and the President appears to be engaging a Bible that’s been propped before him on a stand. I understand that he is a ghost that will haunt us until our nation comes to grips with what has happened: that he is gone, that he has been stolen from us, that it is irreversible. And I’m not an idiot. I know what’s really being stolen from me, slowly and irrevocably, before my eyes. I know that late at night I should be going to Charlotte instead of the President.

  But when I’m with Charlotte, there’s a membrane between us, a layer my mind places there to protect me from the tremor in her voice, from the pulse visible in her desiccated wrists, from all the fates she sarcastically paints. It’s when I’m away from her that it comes crashing in—it’s in the garage that it hits me how scared she is, it’s at the store when I cross tampons off the list that I consider how cruel life must seem to her. Driving now, I think about how she has started turning toward the wall even before the last song on the Nirvana album is over, that soon, even headphones and marijuana will cease to work. My off-ramp up ahead is blurry, and I realize there are tears in my eyes. I drive right past my exit. I just let the Google lane carry me away.

  When I arrive home, my boss, Sanjay, is waiting for me. I’d messaged him to have an intern deliver the hash reader, but here is the man himself, item in hand. Theoretically, hash readers are impossible. Theoretically, you shouldn’t be able to crack full-field, hundred-key encryption. But some guy in India did it, some guy Sanjay knows. Sanjay’s sensitive about being from India, and he thinks it’s a cliché that a guy with his name runs a start-up in Palo Alto. So he goes by “SJ” and dresses all D school. He’s got a Stanford MBA, but he basically just stole the business model of a company called Reputation Defender. You can’t blame the guy—he’s one of those types with the hopes and dreams of an entire village riding on him.

  SJ follows me into the garage, where I dock the drone and use some slave code to parse its drive. He hands me the hash reader, hand-soldered in Bangalore from an old motherboard. We marvel at it, the most sophisticated piece of cryptography on earth, here in our unworthy hands. B
ut if you want to “curate” the reputations of Silicon Valley, you better be ready to crack some codes.

  He’s quiet while I initialize the drone and run a diagnostic.

  “Long time no see,” he finally says.

  “I needed some time,” I tell him.

  “Understood,” SJ says. “We’ve missed you is all I’m saying. You bring the President back to life, send fifteen million people to our website, and then we don’t see you for a week.”

  The drone knows something is suspicious—it powers off. I force a reboot.

  “Got yourself a drone there?” SJ asks.

  “It’s a rescue,” I say. “I’m adopting it.”

  SJ nods. “Thought you should know the Secret Service came by.”

  “Looking for me?” I ask. “Doesn’t sound so secret.”

  “They must have been impressed with your President. I know I was.”

  SJ has long lashes and big, manga brown eyes. He hits me with them now.

  “I’ve gotta tell you,” he says. “The President is a work of art, a seamlessly integrated data interface. I’m in real admiration. This is a game-changer. You know what I envision?”

  I notice his flashy glasses. “Are those Android?” I ask.

  “Yeah.”

  “Can I have them?”

  He hands them over, and I search the frames for their IP address.

  SJ gestures large. “I envision your algorithm running on Reputation Curator. Average people could bring their personalities to life, to speak for themselves, to customize and personalize how they’re seen by the world. Your program is like Google, Wikipedia, and Facebook, all in one. Everyone with a reputation on the planet would pay to have you animate them, to make them articulate, vigilant . . . eternal.”

  “You can have it,” I tell SJ. “The algorithm’s core is open source—I used a freeware protocol.”