Emily Eternal

by M. G. Wheaton

  Jason glances down, thinking on this for a long moment. This, of course, squares with his memories. What he does with this information is another story. That’s when his fingers find mine. He slips his hand around mine and sighs.

  “I suppose it’s kind of cool someone could know all your deepest, darkest secrets and not run screaming from you, huh?”

  “It’s nice to be known,” I reply, tightening my grip on his hand.

  I exhale. I meant the remark to be about him, but feel it as strongly for myself. Jason knows me as no one else ever has. And yet, he’s still standing here. The apocalypse is erupting around us and he has every reason to put as much distance between us as possible, but he chooses to be in this space. To stay.

  I’m about to say as much when he kisses me. I’m startled at first, but not enough to not kiss him back. He envelopes me in his arms and kisses me with greater urgency. I spare a thought for how absurd this display would look if, say, Mayra walked in, but then surrender to the moment.

  It’s awesome. I mean, if it was purely physical, the nervous response would be intriguing, almost titillating but hardly overwhelming. What blows the doors off the experience is the emotional side. He’s longed for this, but it also comes in a moment in which our relationship had become fraught. So, it’s a relief to him we’re back on the same page, an emotional response I mirror, realizing that I’m relieved as well.

  In addition to that, all we’ve faced together in the past couple of days against a backdrop of insanity, imbues this kiss with such weight it can’t help but deluge him—and thereby me—with pleasurable endorphins. Though I experience this part secondhand, it’s up there with my most potent and powerful experiences. I memorize every aspect—the feeling of his breath, the rise and fall of his chest as I press myself into him, and the exact rhythm of his beating heart.

  XXX

  The sun is just peeking over the horizon when Mayra wakes up. Jason and I have the car packed by then with blankets, extra coats, and some snacks liberated from the basement.

  “We should leave the heat on,” Mayra says, somehow looking worse for wear after her nap. “For the one downstairs.”

  I’d considered doing the opposite but agree.

  We use Siobhan’s phone to hunt down Rana’s home address, a surprisingly easy online search, and Jason maps out the fastest route to Winnipeg. It takes us west out of Massachusetts, up through New York State, then follows the southern banks of Lake Erie all the way to Michigan before reaching Chicago and cutting north through Wisconsin, Minnesota, and North Dakota to the Canadian border. He thinks we can do it if we make one stop for rest around the Great Lakes area.

  “There’ll be some place we can pull off the road and find a bed,” he says. “There’s always a chance somebody at Argosy might connect Mayra’s appearance at the iLAB to Siobhan’s ‘escape’ from the hospital and put out an APB, but if we continue to avoid the major thoroughfares, we should be okay.”

  I hope he’s right.

  A light snow falls as we head out into the midmorning sun. It’s slow going through Southborough but once we’re back on the highway, we make up time. I can’t imagine how exhausted Jason is by now, but if Mayra—who falls asleep ten minutes after we drive off—is any indication, he’ll need some rest soon, too.

  If he’s driving, someone needs to keep him awake and focused. This falls to me. Thus, we begin the most fascinating conversation of my short life. In my capacity as a psychiatrist-in-training, I became accustomed to pulling things from the minds of others like weeds yanked up from a garden, clinically and efficiently. It was different when I had long talks with Nathan. He stressed the importance of an easy and open back-and-forth as the basis of our relationship, believing there was much more I could gain through just everyday chats than if he lectured or tried to teach me something directly. I believed this brought us together, made us close. Now I realize he hid more from me than he let on. By providing me with the illusion of openness, I didn’t stumble into parts of his mind he never wanted me to access.

  I wish I could be like Jason, who, when confronted by my deceptions, felt burned but talked it through with me, eventually accepting my apology, if not my explanation. But Nathan’s not here to explain and never will be. I have to learn to live with it.

  But here is a person who has no interest in me as a tool or childlike protégé. Speaking to Jason, I come to better understand the rhythm of human interaction. He wants to know about me as much as I do him. This is a far cry from being talked to by my “team,” who were predisposed—out of scientific curiosity and despite their best intentions—to treat me as something to be studied. Though I took in his entire body of experiences back in the classroom, I was still analyzing these through the filter of my own existence. But now I realize how much the complexity of the way humans interpret and reinterpret these experiences through an endless parade of newly arriving prisms has eluded me. Now that I can access his memories and the emotions he experiences while forming them, I can better understand how their meanings are formed, only then to change.

  Jason’s stories lead to my stories, which lead to inquiries, which lead to tangents, which lead to laughter. It’s easy to talk to him, but I learn as much from his pitch, hesitations, and connections as I do from his words.

  “Ah, my sister—where to begin,” he says but in a half-melancholy, half-wistful way. “She’s the family cautionary tale. She crossed every line put in front of her, landed herself in trouble every time. But in doing so, taught me where the lines were. I got away with murder because of her.”

  “I wonder if that’s a unique feeling for this sister of mine, Emily-2.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, she came first, wasn’t up to snuff, then was shoved aside for me—the prodigal,” I explain. “But then I fall out of favor and suddenly she’s back, maybe having learned from her mistakes but also mine.”

  “Would you be grateful for the opportunity?” Jason asks. “Or still mad about being pushed aside?”

  “No clue.”

  “But how would you feel? You can say sibling or ancestor, but you and this Emily-2 would be similar, no? Same exact programming? That’s closer than twins.”

  “True,” I admit. “But very different environmental upbringing. Which is everything. We start from the same place with Nathan as our parent, but then he sees how one turns out and changes how he parents the next one. For better or worse.”

  Jason laughs. “You know, I sometimes wish my father could see how Ana turned out. All I remember of him is frustration that we wouldn’t fit into the mental boxes he’d designed for us; only he didn’t have the option to reboot the program. We were lucky our mom’s parents were around so much. They were happy with us being whoever we were and whatever we evolved into.”

  “Your father died?”

  “Not long after he divorced our mom. He wasn’t a happy person. It’s probably wrong to think this way, but I think he was happy at the end. Relieved there were no more days ahead of him.”

  He says my father but our mother. He talks easily about his sister, but in a way that tells me he’s told this version many times. When he talks of his father, it’s as if he’s still in rehearsal, still unsure how it affects him.

  If I’d taken all of this from his mind, it’d be so simple. A + B = C. To hear the way he speaks about it reveals a much more complex equation, one in which its subject still grapples with how this early result shaped his later life.

  “What about you?” he asks.

  “Well, I didn’t have a childhood,” I say.

  “Okay, not literally,” he says, “but you did have a first experience with a whole variety of things. They always talk about psychology as a collision of genetic predisposition and environment.”

  “Wow, tell me more about this mysterious field,” I reply. “What did you call it? Psy-chol-o-gy? Sounds so complicated!”

  Jason scowls. I grin. He sighs.

  “Fine,” he says. “As som
eone whose sole mission in life is to engage with people about their worst problems and traumas, you seem a remarkably resilient, positive person. I assume in real—”

  He catches himself before saying his next word. I shrug.

  “I’m not real. We can dance around the semantics or you can assume I haven’t forgotten.”

  “Jeez!” he exclaims. “Bite my head off.”

  I kiss his cheek instead. “I think I know where you were going, though,” I admit. “In real life, psychiatrists and psychologists have a whole trove of experiences with non-patients to form their worldview, whereas mine are almost all in a clinical situation.”

  “Exactly. So, one might think all that pain would be reflected in your personality in some way. But it’s anything but.”

  I’d never considered this before, running through these interactions in my memory before I reply.

  “The death of a parent is traumatic for several reasons if a child is four, fourteen, or forty when it happens,” I say. “Though Nathan’s death affects me in similar ways to my subjects, it’s not like a human reaction. I don’t have that attendant existential fear of dying that colors the experience for so many.”

  “Does his betrayal—or at least his lying to you—color it instead?”

  I wonder if Jason’s question is a subtle reminder of my betrayal of him, but I decide it’s not.

  “I’d love to say it hasn’t, but I know it has,” I admit. “It’s hard to process being lied to by someone you thought was the one person hardwired to deliver you the truth. I feel so naïve thinking he could be anything but satisfied with my performance. I practically ran on the feeling of accomplishment I was programmed to receive after executing tasks. It felt so human to be glad to have purpose.”

  “But you’ve gone beyond that now,” Jason says. “Other things make you happy.”

  “True,” I admit. “But drawing happiness from the outside world, not simply an internal process, was something I had to learn to do for myself. My experiences with you have certainly helped that.”

  “How so?”

  “You can probably point to a number of times in your life in which you were happy,” I reply. “But I only have five years or so to pull from. That makes it easier for me. But the happiest I’ve ever been was not when I experienced something from life or even borrowed off the happiness of another—it was a combination of both. I know it’s a sore spot, but remember in Paris, when, well…we took the train up to Viarmes?”

  “Sure,” he says, bemused.

  “In your memory, you showed those huge three intertwined trees to Sandrine, who was kind of into it, kind of not?” I say. “In inserting myself, I allowed myself to imagine it both as you, feeling all romantic, and then as the person to which you directed all that lusty intent. I then put myself in her shoes and responded how I would have done instead of her, which increases your ardor.”

  “I’m so lost,” he says.

  “I get to bleed the experiences together,” I say. “I was both observer and imagined participant, experiencing your happiness, my own, and what I could glean from her all at the same time. Three at once, like the trees themselves. I’ve never been happier.”

  Jason smiles over at me for so long I worry he might run off the road. “For me, it’s only you and that’s fine. Maybe better.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “There’s no memory of a third person, so it’s you I wake up with that morning, you I ride the train with, you with whom I hike through town,” he says. “Your memory of it is tinted by the deception. Mine, if I don’t think about it too hard, is the pure version—a romantic day out with someone I knew so intimately, was so comfortable with, and am sitting beside even now. Instead of experiencing it as three, I get to—perhaps selfishly—as one.”

  “But you know it’s false,” I say reluctantly.

  “I do,” he says. “But I can push that to the side. I can choose not to care. You don’t have that option.”

  I think about this. When I used to see Jason on campus, it was always that same moment of joy. It was never shaded by its repetition because I didn’t have a more nuanced way of experiencing “seeing one’s crush.” But now I understand a bit more. Part of being human means not only developing that emotional scar tissue but also being its cause in others.

  I think about Nathan in these terms and hope the same.

  As I think on this, he seems to realize the mental contortions I’m putting myself through and extends a hand.

  “Join me for a second?”

  I enter his memory as we sit under that tree in the Val-d’Oise. I lean my head on his shoulder. But it’s not really a memory right now but a daydream, one Jason’s imagining right now.

  “How’s this?” he asks.

  I feel the moment as Jason does and he’s right, a perfect experience in its simplicity. I soak it up for a minute but then exit, returning to the car.

  “No?” he asks, curious. “Not better?”

  “No, because it’s yours, not mine,” I say. “Deception or not, I had an authentic experience in your memory. And I’d never felt happier or more at home in the world. Never more human. That response is impossible to replicate.”

  He goes quiet for a second, then tightens his grip on my hand. I respond in kind. We sit in silence even as I feel a warming tension between us. Anticipation is a better way of describing it. We know we’ll return to exploring this emotional vein, but what we’ll find is anyone’s guess, so as we turn over the possibilities, the waiting is as excruciating as it is necessary.

  In the late afternoon, Mayra takes over the driving as Jason rests in the backseat. Around ten, she spies a recently painted sign announcing a motel open for business a few miles off the interstate. We take the next exit, find a small, L-shaped motel with about a dozen units nestled in the woods, and get two rooms for the price of a can of gasoline. We have only two left, but that should take us into Manitoba.

  Mayra is tired but still asks if we want to join her for dinner with the motel’s manager and his wife, an elderly couple that are very welcoming of company. We decline, feigning exhaustion. Mayra seems to know better.

  Once in our room, we circle around one another for a few minutes but ours is a collapsing orbit. Our hands and arms then bodies move closer. My lips find their way puckishly to his cheek, then his earlobe, finally his lips. He kisses me back, full of passion but lacking in urgency. As if to let me know we have all the time in the world.

  The lights go off. We sink onto the bed and kiss for another quarter hour. For the two hours after that, we make love. Okay, fine—more like three. And a half. Almost four.

  But that’s all I’m going to say about that.

  Okay, for the sake of science, I’ll say a little more.

  Though I am not physical and thereby can’t feel anything except that which I experience through Jason’s senses, I can calibrate my sense of gratification to match his. In merging with his mind and nervous system, I maximize his experience, which includes as many parts advancing as retreating—similar in ways to our unspoken tête-à-tête in the Blazer. Rhythm and unexpected variation is key, like in the composition of music. Despite my own hang-ups about any limitations I might present as a nonphysical being, I discover the immense joy I take in creating pleasure for Jason. This leads me to wonder, however, if I can or will ever achieve a plane of feeling that would make my actions here feel like anything more than amateur sublimation.

  I certainly hope so. But if I can’t make it an authentically individual experience for myself yet, sharing it in this way is an acceptable substitute. Or better yet, consuming another’s experience will create for me a range of feeling that I’ll be able to call up, perceiving as subconscious, such as the pleasure I derive from drinking tea. All this to say, my reactions and responses to sexual stimuli might be the closest I’ve come to expressing a measurable, human-like feeling of my own yet.

  Afterward, I allow myself to sleep for the first time since th
e night Nathan died. I leave consciousness, absolve myself from thought, and rest my head on Jason as his arm engulfs me, drawing me in.

  Rather than sleep, the process of staying in interface allows me to watch Jason’s dreams replay if not the actions of the day, at least the emotions. It’s repetitious and claustrophobic, like being in a tiny ship adrift in a storm-troubled sea. Still, I resist soothing his experience, enduring it all with him.

  His heart rate drops as he settles into a deeper sleep, but I remain awake within him, allowing my scent and warmth to surround his as he slips away. Somewhere, his subconscious responds by pulling my body tighter against his.

  I return to his mind. The storm has passed. All is still. I return to my memory of our first kiss and imagine it happening back in France, under that tree. It’s in that memory I stay for the rest of the night.

  “Good morning.”

  I wake six hours later, beckoned from slumber by Jason’s words. He is still here, and I am still with him.

  “Good morning,” I whisper back.

  “You’re dressed?” he asks.

  I look down. He’s naked under the sheets. I, without thinking, woke up with my clothes on, my hair back to perfect-adjacent. I consider cheating and blinking my clothes off but what a missed opportunity that’d be.

  “Hang on,” I say, sliding out of bed and taking my clothes off. “Better?”

  “Much,” he agrees.

  I climb back into bed, kissing him as I press back into him. I put my arms around him, playing my hands up his neck, my fingers fondling his hair. He kisses me back and I know immediately we’re going to have sex again.

  It doesn’t last as long this time. We both know the world’s going to arrive in the form of a knock, a ringing phone, or a memory that reminds us how dire everything is. It’s with this knowledge we cling to each other. If we could stop the world in this moment, we wouldn’t think twice.