“That’s until we build new bodies of silicon and robotic prostheses for them,” Camille said. “We’d program each of the bodies with an individual’s unique brain map, then upload the consciousness into the body’s mainframe.”
“But would the uploaded consciousness be the same as the original?” Tom asked.
“It would have to be, it developed from the original’s brain map and neurons.”
“So…you’re striving for immortality.”
Camille shrugged.
“Perhaps. At least trying to make death a slave to people.”
Tom was quiet.
“What about those who die suddenly? Without their consciousness uploaded?” Cordo asked.
“Hopefully their brain has already been mapped and if taken quickly enough, the neurons ought to be enough for the brain map to reconstruct the consciousness to the point it was when the brain was scanned. Ideally everyone would have their brain scanned and neuron samples taken every year to be up to date.”
“What happens after the consciousness is uploaded into the new body, is it deleted from the computer program?” Cordo asked.
“It’s up to the original. He or she may want to die or go on living in updated versions of the prosthetic body.”
“So long as they can afford it,” Tom put in.
Camille took a second.
“We’re not concerned with that at the moment.”
Tom took a deep breath, a Christian discussing the merits of Satanism.
“Wow. I can see why you’ve gotten so much funding.”
Amelia and Camille nodded, sterile silence returning as they turned back to their meals.
“Where did you get a brain map for your current program?” Cordo asked. “The neurons?”
Tom looked up, perhaps surprised he himself had not asked these questions.
“They were mine,” Camille said.
Neither man was prepared for this answer.
“We extracted them from my spinal cord, my ganglia, and my brain—cell bodies, we figured any axon tissue would just be redundant.”
“We?” Cordo looked over at Amelia. “You helped her?”
Amelia nodded.
“Using rodents as test subjects would have taken too long and anyway weren’t what we were looking for. Human cells were the only sensible—”
“Jesus, how could you help her do that?” Cordo demanded. “After all the scrutiny this family has been under, for you to do something like that is so fucking stupid, Amelia.”
Amelia was silent.
“Say something, for God’s sake!”
“Camille’s pregnant.”
Dead silence in the air, Tom and Cordo pale. The women watched them as Tom turned to Cordo, waited for him to respond. Cordo smiled deliriously.
“Of course she is,” Cordo said. “Because God has such a good goddamn sense of humor!”
He scraped back his chair, stood, and stormed out of the house.
He walked into Olympia and called a taxi to take him home and Tom arrived home too half an hour later, Cordo already well into a bottle of wine.
“How was dinner?” he asked, sprawled out in his papasan chair.
Tom collapsed on the couch and Cordo chewed his bottom lip, eyes shimmering diamonds in the light seeping in from the kitchen.
“I don’t understand these fuckin’ people,” Cordo said. “Why do they keep doing this to me?”
“It’s not spiteful.”
“Bullshit, of course it’s spiteful! Amelia probably slipped some cum up Camille’s pussy when she was takin’ out those goddamn neurons!”
Tom stiffened.
“That’s hideous.”
“Goddamn right it is. I raised a hideous fuckin’ daughter.”
He looked away, drank the wine left in his cup, refilled. He sloshed it around, sighed.
“All I ever wanted was Lourdes…” Cordo said. “I don’t mean I don’t love you, I…”
Tom nodded, understanding, bade Cordo go on.
“…and I wound up with everything but her. I have a daughter who…hates me for reasons I’ll probably never understand.”
“She doesn’t—”
“Yes, she does, yes, she does. And, granted, I probably wasn’t the best father but at least I didn’t fuckin’ abandon her before she was born and yet for some reason, Amelia’s entire life has been spent sanctifying Lourdes and I don’t get any rest from it, am I such a contemptible piece of shit?”
Tom said nothing as Cordo composed himself, sniffling, drinking. Tom sat forward.
“You deserve to be treated better, I agree,” Tom said. “But a child-parent relationship is not supposed to be proportionate.”
“I just want a little relief, a sign she recognizes—”
“Even if she gives nothing, you gotta give everything, we’ve gotta be there for Amelia and Camille and that baby always.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re family, nothing ever changes that—no matter what they say
or do, no matter how young or old, how many kids they have, no matter what, we have to be there for them.”
Cordo wiped his face.
“So,” he said. “That’s it. We’re great-grandparents.”
They both laughed.
The next evening after Tom got home, Cordo called Amelia and apologized for the previous night and told her I love you and then he talked to Camille and congratulated her on the pregnancy and told her he loved her and promised to be there for the three of them any time. He asked if she and Amelia wanted to go to a movie over the weekend and they declined, always talking in unaffected unemotional tones, like gray talking walls. Cordo said that was OK, I love you both, and hung up.
Cordo persisted with his requests to take out his daughter and granddaughter and he was rebuffed more often than not. Camille predicted her child would be a girl and was confirmed at the hospital, Cordo and Tom in the hospital waiting room, and when Amelia and Camille came out and told them the news, they spoke with all the detachment of oracles prophesying to unlearned farmers.
Hortense Lourdes Tendler was born on October 13, Camille’s birthday. She weighed 8.6 pounds and was perfectly healthy and, as her forbearers, immediately took to crying.
Driving home Cordo said how stupid the name was. Tom responded that it was from Latin, meaning ‘gardener.’
By this time Margaret had been dead two years, though this is not significant—as she hadn’t ever been of much use to Amelia except to drive her and Camille to school and became less useful once Amelia got her license and car—except to say that, like Amelia, Camille did not fret over Hortense’s unbearable crying. And to Cordo’s and Tom’s moderate surprise, as they held their temples and wished their ears would spontaneously build up deafening barricades of wax each time the women visited, Amelia nor Camille ever winced at the baby’s cries.
Never was any thought given to medication or going to a sleep clinic, as mother and grandmother constantly surrounded the babe, two imperturbable bastions showing Hortense her eventual futures.
Amelia took care of Hortense so that Camille could graduate on time.
Cordo and Tom threw her a graduation party—a thoroughly intimate affair made up of only the five of them, eating hamburgers and hot dogs and then vanilla-ice-cream cake afterward on the back porch of Tom and Cordo’s house.
The men spent more time with the women, so much so that their ears more or less acclimated to Hortense’s wailing—it was either that or go mad.
Cordo noticed the same indifference to his existence and efforts in Camille that had long been his point of anguish with Amelia, who was no different though she was near 30.
Still, every weekend and a few days of the week, some combination of Tom and Cordo saw some combination of the women and Cordo often volunteered to Amelia to babysit Hortense, who soon had her first words in English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Latin, and Swedish.
Despite Cordo doing so for her, Amelia had never t
aken any pictures of Camille nor had she composed anything such as a baby book or saved any of her teeth nor kept a newspaper from the day of her birth and Cordo and Tom never heard Amelia wax nostalgic for Camille’s early years.
In the same stringent tradition did Camille raise Hortense.
In case Amelia ever did become sentimental, though, Cordo and Tom had taken pictures—of Amelia’s and Camille’s childhoods and would do so for Hortense also—and kept them in albums in their bedroom closet.
Camille was now 16, in her second year of grad school at UW. Hortense was three and talked at great length of sophisticated mathematic equations and scientific theories when she wasn’t having night terrors or listening to the voice in her head, her imaginary friend, talk incessantly, too fast to comprehend the pieces but she understood the whole of what it told her, which was how she learned the Church-Turing Thesis, the Borlaug Hypothesis.
Amelia was 29 and had concluded her research at UW and now worked exclusively at Titus and she had been less available for when Tom and Cordo tried to spend time as a family.
Tom was 58 and a full professor at UW. Cordo was 54 and the author of 20 books, eight of them bestsellers and two made into movies—which hadn’t done well at the box office but what did it matter, the rights checks had cleared. They were still married and still lived in the Everett house.
One day in October, Cordo was sitting in his papasan chair reading The Orchard Keeper. He was babysitting Hortense, who was in Amelia’s old room with the door shut, undoubtedly reading some botany or psychology or theoretical-physics book, while Camille, Tom, and Amelia were each in their respective labs.
So engrossed in McCarthy’s prose was he that he jumped in his seat when his cell phone started playing “Downtown Train” alighting with some unsaved number’s call. He answered after coming back into this less-bleak world.
“Hello?”
“Cordorubias Tendler?”
“Speaking.”
It was a lieutenant with the Olympia Police Department.
Ash in the air and piles of scorched still-smoking housing planks and roofing tiles and Amelia’s car, driver’s door open, which must have caught fire and exploded to look so maimed, in the middle of the black bed of soot—was all that remained of Amelia’s house.
Cordo violently braked at the yellow police tape cordoning off 25 feet all around the destruction. He got out and police accosted him, demanded to know who he was. Around the smoking rubble where once Amelia’s house had stood, the fire chief was investigating.
Through the course of the investigation, Tom and Cordo and Camille and Hortense lived in separate rooms at a hotel in Olympia. Neither Camille nor Hortense had expressed any concern when Cordo told them Amelia’s house had burned down and she could not be found anywhere and Tom had not seen her at the lab in a long time and the investigators found bones, blackened, in the rubble and when was the last time you saw Ms. Tendler, girls? asked a detective who visited them at the hotel.
Camille and Hortense replied they had both seen her at home that morning—they’d waited for Cordo to come pick up Hortense and take her to Everett and then Amelia and Camille had left for Seattle.
“Did she act strange at all?” the detective asked Camille and Hortense, who sat on a couch in their hotel room, Tom and Cordo standing behind them.
“No.”
“Not at all.”
Cordo watched the detective’s face—frustrated, wanting more from the two, who were neither melancholy nor belligerent, only distant.
Dental records confirmed the bones were Amelia’s. A look into her bank statement revealed she had spent $464 at a Seattle hardware store the morning of the fire. Going there to consult the proprietor, he told detectives a woman matching Amelia’s description had come in shortly after he’d opened that day—eight a.m.—and bought more than a dozen huge gas tanks.
The charge after this was for $100 at an Everett gas station at 8:31. Her car could only hold about $30 but residue on gas tank shards showed her car had not received any kind of fill up.
So, searching the wreckage, with the car and its open door just where it had been when the fire had been fought and vanquished, investigators found pieces of red-burned-black plastic, though surely no prints could be salvaged.
They searched the car: no prints, no fibers, no residue, nothing to suggest anyone who shouldn’t have been in the car had been. The driver door had no marks on it to suggest it had been pried open from the outside. Moreover, a forensic scientist found that the car’s front end was mangled and windshield broken in such ways that could only be achieved by crashing through something—the garage door, say. Further, the car’s position on the remains of the house was directly in line with four depressions in the gravel driveway, which depressions were preceded by curving tracks up from the road downhill.
“This is our working hypothesis,” the detective told the family back in Everett, where now Camille and Hortense lived with Cordo and Tom. “After Mr. Tendler picked up Hortense and took her to Everett, Ms. Tendler took Camille to the university in Seattle shortly before eight’o’clock, stopped off at Mel’s Hardware, bought the gas cans, then filled them up in Olympia before going home, where she either doused the house before or after crashing through the garage, leaving the car door open, and somehow igniting the fire and staying inside.”
For the time the investigators could not answer Tom’s and Cordo’s bumbling questions as to why she’d done this. Camille and Hortense said nothing.
Then, in pursuit of an answer to this maddening question, the county medical examiner extracted some marrow from Amelia’s bones.
“The fire damage is so severe that, should anything relevant be in the marrow, it might very well be damaged or altogether useless,” the detective said to Cordo, relaying the examiner’s words.
But the examiner extracted nonetheless.
“Were you aware your daughter’s cancer had metastasized?”
Tom, Camille, and Hortense sat beside him but only Tom shared Cordo’s speechless expression.
“The examiner’s official cause of death is suicide.”
Cordo turned around to Camille and Hortense after seeing the detective out. He stayed back from them on the couch, as though he didn’t trust himself to be too near them.
“She had cancer?” he asked them.
Tom moved to look out the back door, hiding his crying, but no one paid him any attention then.
Cordo glared at the girls, expressions showing no discomfort nor awkwardness.
“We didn’t know,” Camille said.
“Bullshit! You both are such fucking geniuses but you couldn’t tell she was wasting away, you couldn’t tell something was wrong, that she was sick? Bullshit! Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t she?”
Neither replied, only glared at Cordo, who was fuming steam, salivating acid.
“You fucking little bitches—”
He lurched at Camille and grabbed fistfuls of her hair and yanked her off the couch to the floorboards, wrenching in pain and sudden fear, and Hortense cried out, scrambling up onto the arm of the couch, and Tom spun, face red and swollen, and gasped at the scene and grabbed Cordo’s wrists and tried to break his hold on his granddaughter’s hair but Cordo shoved him away, torqueing his hands to pull harder, Camille crying and shrinking farther into the floor while Cordo screamed at her, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
But then Tom was on him again, broke his hold, then pulled him away, “Are you fucking insane?” as Camille scrambled to her feet, grabbed Hortense, and rushed out the door.
“How could they keep that from me? How—”
“Amelia didn’t want them to!”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, she didn’t want you to worry—”
“She was my fucking daughter, I deserved to know!”
“I know, I know—”
“Goddamn it!”
He shoved Tom away and went out to the backyard in the rain.
But some days and bottles of whiskey and fits of rage and despair later, the media had exhausted the story. Camille and Hortense came under Cordo’s guardianship and Tom insisted they all stay home from the university for a while.
Cordo got a hotel in Seattle to drink and cry in. He returned home a few days later and there was unbearable tension when they were all together. His mouth a desert, Cordo apologized to Camille and Hortense, who stood near him but miles away, not fearful, not emotive, as always.
Camille nodded and she and her daughter headed into their shared bedroom. Tom hugged Cordo, welcoming him back home, and soon they got back to what regular life was left them.
Several months later Camille and Tom were at the university and Hortense was holed up in her room devouring books.
Cordo went into his and Tom’s bedroom and got down the half-dozen photo albums from the top shelf from inside the closet. Their covers were varnished with dust, so he wiped them down with a damp rag and revealed the small laminated windows upon each cover, through which showed the black embossed names of those whose pictures were in each: Amelia and Camille both had two and so eventually would Hortense, though currently her first book was only half-full.
He closed his door and sat upon his bed and opened Amelia’s first book, full of pictures of her in the hospital after she’d recovered from what ailments—mostly a red nose and dried snot and saliva on her face and body—she’d developed during her lone night on the beach and Cordo flipped through the pages to get to those from when he’d brought her home.
He started crying as he looked through the pictures and perhaps that was his intended goal in doing this.
Despite she had given him no rest, still he’d managed to capture her image occasionally, although it had been Tom who’d taken most of the pictures and had the idea to start the albums, and many of the pictures had a younger bewildered-looking Cordo trying to calm Amelia.
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