Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles (11 page)

I
n twenty years Emma's life will look like this: she lives outside San Francisco, clear across the fruited plains, on the flip side of the mountains' majesty. Had a kid with Peter Cash. He's in college now—the kid, not Peter Cash. She left politics and went into policy work on behalf of former professional football players, of all things. We won't have talked for ages, but every year I'll send her a birthday card with a longish letter folded inside. I'll do this because I like to believe it makes her feel good, to know that at least one of the promises I made—to love her for the rest of my life—I actually followed through on.

She rises in the morning and makes herself tea. Her hair is now mostly white. She puts it up in a loose bun, looks herself over in the mirror, presses her hands to her neck, turns this way and that, frowns, wonders, like the rest of us, where the time went. The mug of tea sits untouched on the back of the toilet tank, next to the sink, an ignored ritual. Peter Cash comes into the bathroom, showers while she plucks her eyebrows, shaves quickly at the sink while she showers. They move around the small space with the synchronicity of a water ballet, each of their bits of personal grooming timed perfectly to make room for the other's. She brushes her teeth and puts in her earrings with NPR in the background, slings her work bag over her shoulder, says good-bye to Peter Cash. Some mornings she kisses him; most mornings she does not. He's fine either way. She drives her car to the office without appearing to think too much about anything. Face stuck in a kindly neutral. Great and painful and passionate things roiling below, forever below, like the molten rock beneath Yellowstone. A walking manifestation of Hemingway's iceberg, a cypher with eyes that startle you to attention one moment, break your heart the next when she turns them away from you. The eyes are the same. The eyes never change.

I
don't know who brought my carcass to
la emergencia
. Presumably someone in the crowd took pity on me, or maybe the owner of the
gallera
realized how bad off I was and worried it'd be his ass if I died. Regardless, someone dropped me without ceremony or explanation on the pavement by the entrance to the clinic, and the next day I woke up to find the doctors making plans to transport me to the hospital on the main island.

I pulled the IV out of my hand and hobbled out, glimpsed in passing lives suspended by the pain and debility of bodies prone to failure: door no. 1, a plump girl, fifteen maybe, face wan and vacant, a tube up her nose and, presumably, snaking down into her stomach; door no. 2, a fortyish woman alternately vomiting into a large emesis basin and moaning in a way and at a volume that I had a tough time thinking of as anything other than melodramatic; door no. 3, a quiet bloodbath—stabbing, looked like—the patient silent and still and the professionals in lab coats and pastel scrubs milling about with an alarming lack of urgency; door no. 4, a young towheaded boy enduring a spinal tap, the physician murmuring reassurances while himself appearing quite nervous, the boy screaming, his limbs held down on the bed by well-meaning adults I hoped he would grow old enough to hate.

I stumbled through the rush of automatic doors, went down to the main road, and hitched a ride back to the casita.

Charlotte, looking drawn and tired and very old from three days of drinking and worrying, fussed over me. I told her I was fine, that I just wanted to rest on the porch with a Medalla, and she was welcome to join me. We sat in silence as the afternoon sun blasted us. Sweat sprung up all over my body, stinging cuts and contusions. Charlotte wanted to caretake, but really the only thing to do was spare me painful hobbling trips to the refrigerator, and she retrieved beers for us both with great doting kindness until early evening.

Roberto's work truck pulled to the curb in front of the casita around seven. He removed his bulk from the cab and looked up at the porch, shielding his eyes against the slanting sun. I waved to him, and he came around and took the stairs.

I am sorry for what they did to you, he said.

What who did? Charlotte wanted to know.

I did not ask them for this, Roberto said.

I thought he might cry.

Roberto, it's fine, I told him. For God's sake, man, I know it wasn't you.

Why did you go? he asked.

I thought for a minute. It was a good question. I don't know, I said. I guess I was intrigued. You know ‘intrigued'? Curious?

Roberto, understanding now, nodded. Yes, I know curious. It killed
el gato
, my friend.

I laughed, then grimaced at the pain.

You should go home, Roberto said. To your woman. Go home and no come back.

It's no problem now, I said. There won't be any more fighting.

Fights will not be your problem, Roberto said, if you do not go back to her. You will have other problems.

Which woman? Charlotte asked. Which woman is he talking about?

A
nother theory I find appealing is that the Singularity could and likely will render the body, and therefore sex, and therefore by extension romantic love, as obsolete as a Walkman personal stereo.

T
he fact that you don't know what a Walkman personal stereo is only serves to illustrate my point, of course: after the Singularity, it's likely that the sight of two people kissing on a sidewalk will seem as strange and anachronistic as a man going out into the world with a cassette player clipped to the waist of his pants.

In any event, the point is that our bodies will be rendered obsolete through any of a number of potential processes. One such process is called mind uploading, in which what we think of as our selves can, if we choose, exist and function perpetually as software on a computer system. In a virtual-reality simulation, or something akin to one.

The nearest current analog I can think of is the movie
Tron,
although the reality and circumstances of mind uploading, when it happens, will no doubt bear only the slightest resemblance to the film.

Think of it: existing free of a physical body, and therefore free of its frailties, its requirements and desires. No disease, no death, no pain. No need to eat, or brush one's teeth, or worry about body odor. And the macro-picture: overpopulation becomes effectively moot. Shortages of any kind of resource no longer a concern. I could go on, but you get the point, and the aspect of mind uploading that concerns us here is, as I said: without a body, there is no impetus for, and indeed no possibility of, sex.

Because with Emma and me our problems started, or at least were made most manifest, in the bedroom. We punched and clawed at each other, fought like animals. I've told you a little about this, but you don't yet understand the scope of it. I took beatings from her that rivaled anything the caballeros did to me. The sheets were almost always spotted with blood. On more than one occasion she stood before the bathroom mirror, fingers parsing her hair, and complained that I was leaving bald patches on her scalp. Neither of us seemed to know why we did it. We couldn't stop hurting each other, and we couldn't leave one another alone.

But take away our bodies, make us both purely digital manifestations of our consciousness, and what happens? Uncertain. Maybe we live calmly together in an accelerated virtual reality, loving one another until the end of all existence, our brains operating at a speed that necessitates that the virtual sun rise and set 260 times in 24 hours in order for the day/night cycle to seem normal to us. Or maybe without the brutal clash of our bodies Emma and I lose interest in one another and spend forever comfortably productive, cultivating endless stores of knowledge and attendant deduction, making connections of logic and cognition we never would have otherwise, because although we wouldn't be any smarter than our former selves we would think much faster, and therefore could understand things we never would have had the time to glean understanding of before. Like maybe why we were compelled to punch and claw, to bare our teeth at each other, why our lusts were never satisfied until someone was bleeding.

A
lthough as a novelist I could have spent most of my days darning socks or playing solitaire and no one would have noticed or cared, I did occasionally have an obligation that required I be somewhere at a certain time on a certain date, and also that I be capable of standing for at least an hour and speaking in complete sentences. One of these obligations surfaced not long after Ajax beat the heart out of me. A small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania had asked me to read, the invitation coming many months before, when it had seemed like a much better idea. Now I wanted nothing to do with it, but being my father's son I packed a decent pair of pants and a pressed shirt in my garment bag, got on the Cessna that took me to the mainland, boarded a much larger plane for a flight to Philly, then took the train west through hills and valleys where people sat mourning the loss of steel and wondering what came next.

The reading was well attended, and I didn't shake too badly, and the audience seemed to appreciate the material from the novel I was working on about Emma, though neither they nor I had any idea what a phenomenon that novel would become. In the front row sat a willowy redheaded undergrad, quiet but attentive, achingly beautiful. Beautiful and sexy in equal measure, and you understand that the two aren't necessarily synonymous. Skin like 2 percent milk, this girl. When the reading broke up I thought about her a little bit over a beer—her features, fragile as a Fabergé egg, and her black leggings, and those boots, and the way she listened and gazed as though not just taking in the words but sort of calmly absorbing something essential about me. Somehow this quiet watchful girl found the hotel where the school put me up, and she had the front desk page me just after one in the morning. I came downstairs, perplexed and with a head full of whiskey, and found her in the lobby, arms crossed over her chest, collarbones standing out above the scooped neck of her blouse. Now all her calm watchfulness had abandoned her, and there was something desperate on her face.

And I said, Hi.

Do you remember me? she asked.

From the reading, I said.

Yes.

There was a long pause, during which I considered that she might be drunk.

I said to her, Is there something that you want?

She was trying to smile, trying to appear cheerful, but still just looking desperate in a way that made me feel bad, even though I wasn't responsible for her desperation. She shrugged at my question, more out of frustration than perplexity, and looked away quickly as her eyes began to shimmer.

It seemed like maybe I should put a hand on her shoulder, but I didn't want to commit to that.

Finally she looked at me, and she was genuinely close to tears, and she said: I don't know
what
I want. Her voice broke a little, as she said this.

Later, after she stopped crying and I shook her hand and sent her home, I had another glass of whiskey in my room as regret flowed through me: regret that she was so sad and vulnerable, regret that, even if my mind hadn't been on someone else, and even if the willowy redhead had not been so young and sad and vulnerable, I still could not have given her what she thought she wanted from me.

T
hat same night, after the reading but before the waif showed up at the hotel, I turned on my phone and found I had a text from Emma: ‘Thinking of you.' That was it.

T
he next morning I had a brief but friendly conversation with a railroad police officer as he swabbed my garment bag for traces of explosives. While he waited for a machine to tell him whether or not I was a terrorist, he asked why I'd been in Pennsylvania, and where I was headed. For whatever reason, I neglected to mention I was spending the winter in the Caribbean, and simply told him I lived in Maine. He said he imagined the seafood was good there. I assured him that it was. He pointed to the fading bruises on my face and asked what had happened. I told him I'd gotten into a fight, which news he accepted with a bare nod, the Yankee sensibility to mind one's business trumping the police officer's innate suspicion. We stood there in silence for a moment, looking at each other. Then the machine beeped, exonerating me, and the officer said I was free to go.

Down on the train platform the sun was too bright, and the wind bared its teeth, and I tried without luck to find a place to hide from the cold. Guys in sweatshirts and hard hats ground old paint away from steel I-beams. The sound was like robots screaming. A paint chip flew into my eye right out of a Plath poem, and I had to turn away from the train as it pulled in because I was afraid I might have the urge to jump in front of it.

W
hen I got back to the island Charlotte hadn't had a drink for four days. Her eyes were bright and clear, her hair tied in a neat, gleaming French braid. She smelled good in a hippy kind of way, like lavender and fresh sweat, and she seemed very calm. I was impressed with her lucidity; intimidated by it, in fact. She'd cleaned and organized the fridge, for God's sake, and lined our footwear up neatly just inside the door.

I don't care why you stopped drinking, I told her. Just don't start again. I'm going to set a bad example, but don't follow it.

I probably won't. At least not at first, Charlotte said.

I opened a Medalla. You were fine with being sober while I was gone. There's no reason why it should be different with me here.

You don't really understand how alcoholics work, do you? Charlotte asked. Which is weird, considering.

You're not an alcoholic.

Maybe not. But I know how they work. My father is a drunk.

I'm sorry to hear that, I said, and meant it.

Don't be. He quit. I was just talking with him about it the other day. I called him after you left.

I swigged from the Medalla. So how'd he manage it?

Well he went to rehab a dozen times. Tune-ups, he called them. You wake up in a locked ward and aren't really sure how you got there, leave after a couple of days. Other times he would just start going to AA meetings at the church. He'd be good for a couple of weeks, a month maybe, and then he'd start up again. This was pretty much the whole time I was a kid. He even went to a hypnotist. Nothing took.

Here Charlotte paused. She seemed to be waiting for me to contribute in some way, so I said, It can be a tough thing to quit, for sure.

Well, yeah. But the thing that ended up working for him was this not really deep realization he had one day. It was a normal morning, for him. His head hurt and he was confused and didn't remember much from the night before. There was no reason to think that this day would be different from any other—he'd get up, spend some time in the shower pulling himself together, then go off to paint houses and stop at Calucci's on the way for a sandwich and a twelve-pack of Bud Heavies, which was what he called regular Budweiser. You know, as a counterpart to Bud Light. Bud Heavy. Get it?

I get it. Very clever.

But anyway, on the day he quit drinking for real, instead of his usual routine he lay in bed for a while, and all he could think about was that he hadn't been
born
drinking. That when he was a kid not only did he not need alcohol but had never even tasted it once, and was perfectly happy and didn't feel like crap all the time. And somehow that was all it took, after years in and out of the hospital and dragging himself all hungover and embarrassed to AA meetings. After ruining his marriage with my mother and disappointing my brother and me God knows how many times. Just this one thought: that he'd been able at one point in his life to exist happily without booze. And he hasn't touched it since. It's been six years.

Charlotte looked at me, not expectant, really, just radiating this new calmness of hers.

So that's why you stopped drinking? I asked. Because of the talk with your old man?

No, Charlotte said. I'd already stopped, and I mentioned it to him, because he was asking why I'd dropped out of school and when I was coming home and all that. I told him it was kind of a confusing time but that I'd stopped drinking so much and things were getting clearer to me.

They are?

Sure.

And so what about this clarity? I asked.

Well for one thing, Charlotte said, I know now that I really am in love with you. That it's not just, you know, boozy disorientation.