SJ flashes a brittle smile. “We’ve actually looked into that,” he says, “and, well, it seems like you coded it with seven-layer encryption.”
“Yeah, I guess I did, didn’t I? You’re the one with the hash reader. Just crack it.”
“I don’t want it to be like that,” SJ says. “Let’s be partners. Your concept is brilliant—an algorithm that scrubs the Web and compiles the results into a personal animation. The President is the proof, but it’s also given away the idea. If we move now, we can protect it, it will be ours. In a few weeks, though, everyone will have their own.”
I don’t point out the irony of SJ wanting to protect a business model.
“Is the President just an animation to you?” I ask. “Have you spoken with him? Have you listened to what he has to say?”
“I’m offering stock,” SJ says. “Wheelbarrows of it.”
The drone offers up its firewall like a seductress her throat. I deploy the hash reader, whose processor hums and flashes red. We sit on folding chairs while it works.
“I need your opinion,” I tell him.
“Right on,” he says and removes a bag of weed. He starts rolling a joint, then passes me the rest. He’s been hooking me up the last couple months, no questions.
“What do you think of Kurt Cobain?” I ask.
“Kurt Cobain,” he repeats as he works the paper between his fingers. “The man was pure,” he says and licks the edge. “Too pure for this world. Have you heard Patti Smith’s cover of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’? Unassailable, man.”
He lights the joint and passes it my way, but I wave it off. He sits there, staring out the open mouth of my garage into the Kirkland plumage of Palo Alto. Apple, Oracle, PayPal, and Hewlett-Packard were all started in garages within a mile of here. About once a month, SJ gets homesick and cooks litti chokha for everyone at work. He plays Sharda Sinha songs and gets this look in his eyes like he’s back in Bihar, land of peepul trees and roller birds. He has this look now. He says, “You know my family downloaded the President. They have no idea what I do out here, as if I could make them understand that I help bad sushi chefs ward off Twitter trolls. But the American President, that they understand.”
The mayor, barefoot, jogs past us. Moments later, a billboard drives by.
“Hey, can you make the President speak Hindi?” SJ asks. “If you could get the American President to say, ‘I could go for a Pepsi’ in Hindi, I’d make you the richest man on earth.”
The hash reader’s light turns green. Just like that, the drone is mine. I disconnect the leads and begin to synch the Android glasses. The drone uses its moment of freedom to rise and study SJ.
SJ returns the drone’s intense scrutiny.
“Who do you think sent it after you?” he asks. “Mozilla? Craigslist?”
“We’ll know in a moment.”
“Silent. Black. Radar deflecting,” SJ says. “I bet this is Microsoft’s dark magic.”
The new OS suddenly initiates, the drone responds, and, using retinal commands, I send it on a lap around the garage. “Lo and behold,” I say. “Turns out our little friend speaks Google.”
“Wow,” SJ says. “Don’t be evil, huh?”
When the drone returns, it targets SJ in the temple with a green laser.
“What the fuck,” SJ says.
“Don’t worry,” I tell him. “It’s just taking your pulse and temperature.”
“What for?”
“Probably trying to read your emotions,” I say. “I bet it’s a leftover subroutine.”
“You sure you’re in charge of that thing?”
I roll my eyes and the drone does a back flip.
“My emotion is simple,” SJ tells me. “It’s time to come back to work.”
“I will,” I tell him. “I’ve just got some things to deal with.”
SJ looks at me. “It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about your wife. But you don’t have to be so alone about things. Everyone at work, we’re all worried about you.”
Inside, Charlotte is suspended in a sling from the Hoyer Lift, which has been rolled to the window so she can see outside. She’s wearing old yoga tights, which are slack on her, and she smells of the cedar oil her massage therapist rubs her with. I go to her and open the window.
“You read my mind,” she says and breathes the fresh air.
I put the glasses on her, and it takes her eyes a minute of flashing around before the drone lifts from my hands. A grand smile crosses her face as she puts it through its paces—hovering, rotating, swiveling the camera’s servos. And then the drone is off. I watch it cross the lawn, veer around the compost piles, and then head for the community garden. It floats down the rows, and though I don’t have the view Charlotte does in her glasses, I can see the drone inspecting the blossoms of summer squash, the fat bottoms of Roma tomatoes. It rises along the bean trellises and tracks watermelons by their umbilical stems. When she makes it to her plot, she gasps.
“My roses,” she says. “They’re still there. Someone’s been taking care of them.”
She has the drone inspect every bud and bloom. Carefully, she maneuvers it through the bright petals, brushing against the blossoms, then shuttles it home again. Suddenly it is hovering before us. Charlotte leans slightly forward and sniffs the drone deeply. “I never thought I’d smell my roses again,” she says, her face flush with hope and amazement, and suddenly the tears are streaming.
I remove her glasses, and we leave the drone hovering there.
She regards me. “I want to have a baby,” she says.
“A baby?”
“It’s been nine months. I could have had one already. I could’ve been doing something useful this whole time.”
“But your illness,” I say. “We don’t know what’s ahead.”
She closes her eyes like she’s hugging something, like she’s holding some dear truth.
“With a baby, I’d have something to show for all this. I’d have a reason. At the least, I’d have something to leave behind.”
“You can’t talk like that,” I tell her. “We’ve talked about you not talking like this.”
But she won’t listen to me, she won’t open her eyes.
All she says is “And I want to start tonight.”
Later in the day I carry the iProjector out back to the gardening shed. Here, in the gold of afternoon light, the President rises and comes to life. He adjusts his collar, cuffs, runs his thumb down a black lapel as if he exists only in the moment before a camera will broadcast him live to the world.
“Mr. President,” I say. “I’m sorry to bother you again.”
“Nonsense,” he tells me. “I serve at the pleasure of the people.”
“Do you remember me?” I ask. “Do you remember the problems I’ve been talking to you about?”
“Perennial is the nature of the problems that plague man. Particular is the voice with which they call to each of us.”
“My problem today is of a personal nature.”
“Then I place this conversation under the seal.”
“I haven’t made love to my wife in a long time.” He holds up a hand to halt me. He smiles in a knowing, fatherly way.
“Times of doubt,” he tells me, “are inherent in the compact of civil union.”
“My question is about children.”
“Children are the future,” he tells me.
“Would you have still brought yours into the world, knowing that only one of you might be around to raise them?”
“Single parenting places too much of a strain on today’s families,” he says. “That’s why I’m introducing legislation that will reduce the burden on our hardworking parents.”
“What about your children? Do you miss them?”
“My mind goes to them constantly. Being away from them is the great sacrifice of the office.”
In the shed, suspended dust makes his specter glitter and swirl. It makes him look like he is cutting out, like he will lea
ve at any moment. I feel some urgency.
“When it’s all finally over,” I ask, “where is it that we go?”
“I’m no preacher,” the President says, “but I believe we go where we are called.”
“Where were you called to? Where is it that you are?”
“Don’t we all try to locate ourselves among the pillars of uncommon knowledge?”
“You don’t know where you are, do you?” I ask the President.
“I’m sure my opponent would like you to believe that.”
“It’s okay,” I say, more to myself. “I didn’t expect you to know.”
“I know exactly where I am,” the President says. Then, in a voice that sounds pieced from many scraps, he adds, “I’m currently positioned at three seven point four four north by one two two point one four west.”
I think he’s done. I wait for him to say Good night and God bless America. Instead, he reaches out to touch my chest. “I have heard that you have made much personal sacrifice,” he says. “And I’m told that your sense of duty is strong.”
I don’t think I agree, but I say, “Yes sir.”
His glowing hand clasps my shoulder, and it doesn’t matter that I can’t feel it.
“Then this medal that I affix to your uniform is much more than a piece of silver. It is a symbol of how much you have given, not just in armed struggle and not just in service to your nation. It tells others how much more you have to give. It marks you forever as one who can be counted upon, as one who in times of need will lift up and carry those who have fallen.” Proudly, he stares into the empty space above my shoulder. He says, “Now return home to your wife, soldier, and start a new chapter of life.”
When darkness falls, I go to Charlotte. The night nurse has placed her in a negligee. Charlotte lowers the bed as I approach. The electric motor is the only sound in the room.
“I’m ovulating,” she announces. “I can feel it.”
“You can feel it?”
“I don’t need to feel it,” she says. “I just know.”
She’s strangely calm.
“Are you ready?” she asks.
“Sure.”
I steady myself on the safety rail that separates us.
She asks, “Do you want some oral sex first?”
I shake my head.
“Come join me, then,” she says.
I start to climb on the bed—she stops me.
“Hey, Sunshine,” she says. “Take off your clothes.”
I can’t remember the last time she called me that.
“Oh, yeah,” I say and unbutton my shirt, unzip my jeans. When I drop my underwear, I feel weirdly, I don’t know, naked. I’m not sure whether I should remove my socks. I leave them on. I swing a leg up, then kind of lie on her.
A look of contentment crosses her face. “This is how it’s supposed to be,” she says. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to look into your eyes.”
Her body is narrow but warm. I don’t know where to put my hands.
“Do you want to pull down my panties?”
I sit up and begin to work them off. I see the scar from the femoral stent. When I heft her legs, there are the bedsores we’ve been fighting.
“Remember our trip to Mexico,” she asks, “when we made love on top of that pyramid? It was like we were in the past and the future at the same time. I kind of feel that now.”
“You’re not high, are you?”
“What?” she asks. “Like I’d have to be stoned to remember the first time we talked about having a baby?”
When I have her panties off and her legs hooked, I pause. It takes all my focus to get an erection, and then I can’t believe I have one. I see the moment coldly, distant, the way a drone would see it: Here’s my wife, paralyzed, invalid, insensate, and though everything’s the opposite of erotic, I am poised above her, completely hard.
“I’m wet, aren’t I?” Charlotte asks. “I’ve been thinking about this all day.”
I do remember the pyramid. The stone was cold, the staircase steep. The past to me was a week of Charlotte in Mayan dresses, cooing every baby she came across. Having sex under faint and sleepy stars, I tried to imagine the future: a faceless someone conceived on a sacrificial altar. I finished early and tried to shake it off. That person would probably never come to be. Plus, we had to focus on matters at hand if we were going to make it down all those steps in the dark.
“I think I feel something,” she says. “You’re inside me, right? Because I’m pretty sure I can feel it.”
Here I enter my wife and begin our lovemaking. I try to focus on the notion that if this works, Charlotte will be safe, that for nine months she’d let no harm come to her, and maybe she’s right, maybe the baby will stimulate something and recovery will begin.
Charlotte smiles. It’s brittle, but it’s a smile. “How’s this for finding the silver lining—I won’t have to feel the pain of childbirth.” This makes me wonder if a paralyzed woman can push out a baby, or does she get the scalpel, and if so, is there anesthesia, and suddenly my body is at the edge of not cooperating.
“Hey, are you here?” she asks. “I’m trying to get you to smile.”
“I just need to focus for a minute,” I tell her.
“I can tell you’re not really into this,” she says. “I can tell you’re still hung up on the idea I’m going to do something drastic to myself, right? Just because I talk about crazy stuff sometimes doesn’t mean I’m going to do anything.”
“Then why’d you make me promise to help you do it?”
The promise came early, in the beginning, just before the ventilator. She had a vomiting reflex that lasted for hours. The doctors said it can happen. Imagine endless dry heaves while you’re paralyzed. The doctors finally gave her narcotics. Drugged, dead-limbed, and vomiting, that’s when it hit her that she was no longer in control. I was holding her hair, keeping it out of the basin. She was panting between heaves.
She said, “Promise me that when I tell you to make it stop, you’ll make it stop.”
“Make what stop?” I asked.
She retched, long and cord-rattling. I knew what she meant.
“It won’t come to that,” I said.
She tried to say something but retched again.
“I promise,” I said.
Now, in her mechanical bed, her negligee straps slipping off her shoulders, Charlotte says, “It’s hard for you to understand, I know. But the idea that there’s a way out, it’s what allows me to keep going. I’d never take it. You believe me, don’t you?”
“I hate that promise, I hate that you made me make it.”
“I’d never do it, and I’d never make you help.”
“Then release me,” I tell her.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
I decide to just shut it all out and keep going. I’m losing my erection, and my mind wonders what will happen if I go soft—do I have it in me to fake it?—but I shut it out and keep going and going, pounding on Charlotte until I can barely feel anything. Her breasts loll alone under me. From the bedside table, the drone turns itself on and rises, hovering. It flashes my forehead with its green laser, as if what I’m feeling is that easy to determine, as if there would be a name for it. Is it spying on me, mining my emotions, or executing old code? I wonder if the hash reader failed or if the drone’s OS reverted to a previous version or if Google reacquired it or if it’s in some kind of autonomous mode. Or it could be that someone hacked the Android glasses, or maybe . . . that’s when I look down and see Charlotte is crying.
I stop.
“No, don’t,” she says. “Keep going.”
She’s not crying hard, but they are fat, lamenting tears.
“We can try again tomorrow,” I tell her.
“No, I’m okay,” she says. “Just keep going and do something for me, would you?”
“All right.”
“Put the headphones on me.”
“You mean, while we’
re doing it?”
“Music on,” she says, and from the headphones on her bedside table, I hear Nirvana start to hum.
“I know I’m doing it all wrong,” I say. “It’s been a long time, and . . .”
“It’s not you,” she says. “I just need my music. Just put them on me.”
“Why do you need Nirvana? What is it to you?”
She closes her eyes and shakes her head.
“What is it with this Kurt Cobain?” I say. “What’s your deal with him?”
I grab her wrists and pin them down, but she can’t feel it.
“Why do you have to have this music? What’s wrong with you?” I demand. “Just tell me what it is that’s wrong with you.”
I go to the garage, where the drone wanders lost along the walls, looking for a way out. I turn on a computer and search online until I find one of these Nirvana albums. I play the whole thing, just sitting there in the dark. The guy, this Kurt Cobain, sings about being stupid and dumb and unwanted. In one song he says that Jesus doesn’t want him for a sunbeam. In another song, he says he wants milk and laxatives along with cherry-flavored antacids. He has a song called “All Apologies,” where he keeps singing, “What else can I be? All apologies.” But he never actually apologizes. He doesn’t even say what he did wrong.
The drone, having found no escape, comes to me and hovers silently. I must look pretty pathetic because the drone takes my temperature.
I lift the remote for the garage-door opener. “Is this what you want?” I ask. “Are you going to come back, or am I going to have to come find you?”
The drone silently hums, impassive atop its column of warm air.
I press the button. The drone waits until the garage door is all the way up. Then it snaps a photograph of me and zooms off into the Palo Alto night.
I stand and breathe the air, which is cool and smells of flowers. There’s enough moonlight to cast leaf patterns on the driveway. Down the street, I spot the glowing eyes of our cat. I call his name but he doesn’t come. I gave him to a friend a couple blocks away, and for a few weeks the cat returned at night to visit me. Not anymore. This feeling of being in proximity to something that’s lost to you, it seems like my whole life right now. It’s a feeling Charlotte would understand if she’d just talk to the President. But he’s not the one she needs to speak to, I suddenly understand. I return to my computer bench and fire up a bank of screens. I stare into their blue glow and get to work. It takes me hours, most of the night, before I’m done.
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014 Page 36
