Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles (16 page)

T
hat same day we spent the afternoon at the small private beach of an older man, a friend I'd met drinking at the bars. Jerry lived in the ruins of a sugar mill, sketching and painting and assembling kinetic sculpture. He was a widower, and his artwork featured a preponderance of the female form that was hard to miss. He and I sat at a low-slung table in the sand, drinking rum and talking about Robert Lowell and Dr. Seuss, while down the beach Emma lay on a towel reading. After a while the conversation dried up and we set about our respective work, he with his sketchbook, me with my Mac, alone together, until Emma rose, used two fingers to pull her black bikini bottom out of the mild wedgie it had settled into, and moved in her feline saunter toward the water. Both Jerry and I looked up from our work and followed her with our eyes. We watched as she bobbed among the blue swells and floated on her back with her toes poking up out of the water, watched still more intently as she emerged and came back toward us, her shoulders and midriff shimmering with saline droplets. When she settled back down onto her towel our eyes lingered for a beat, two, and then we got back to work. I looked up a few minutes later and saw that Jerry had flipped to a fresh page in his notebook, where he'd started a somewhat abstract sketch of a chestnut-haired beauty in a black bathing suit walking forever away, toward the water.

I
ncidentally, there are innumerable trading bots operating in the stock market which no actual person has created. No one knows what they are, or how or why they function the way they do. The only thing we know is that they exist, and that the activity they engage in has discernible patterns. And where there is a pattern, there is usually intent. And where there is intent . . . well, you see where I'm going with this.

O
ver glasses of straight rum, sitting at the high-top table on the porch, I told Emma I'd started a new book, and that it was all about her. I said I didn't know if it would ever be publishable, but I was going to write it anyway.

I'm worried, she said, that your version of me will come across as sad. I don't want people thinking I'm as sad as you make me out to be.

And so I'm telling you now that she was right about this. She is not as sad as I make her out to be. Emma is happy, the very picture of resilience. She wakes up in the morning and contemplates how much she loves her bed. She's friendly and open with strangers who sit next to her at bars, and when the Patriots beat the Jets she jumps up from her seat and claps wildly. She smiles when no one is watching. She hopes for better things, even expects them. She is not like me. I doubt she's ever once considered jumping in front of a train, or pointing her car at a concrete bridge support and flooring the accelerator. She is not sad.

A
month or so before my father died, by which time his end had announced itself unequivocally, I found myself at the grocery store contemplating a small plastic container of salsa. Medium spice, all-natural ingredients, no preservatives so keep refrigerated and consume or discard within seven days of opening. Because the salsa contained no preservatives it seemed more important to check the expiration date than it would have been otherwise, and I turned the container around, flipped it upside down, searching for the tiny print. I examined the lid a second time and found the date, partly obscured by a graphic of a goofy cartoon donkey who may or may not have been drunk. And I read the date, and thought about it a minute, and realized suddenly that in all likelihood this container of salsa had a longer shelf life than my own personal father.

A
propos of nothing, at the beach, while a mackerel sky dimmed the midday sun, Emma asked me, Did you ever notice the orange towel on the back of the bathroom door? In the old house? Before the fire?

I thought for a minute. Shook my head.

You didn't see it? It was hanging there forever.

No. Never noticed it.

It was Matty's, she said. He put it up after the last shower he took, and I couldn't take it down. So I just let it hang there. Eight months. Until the place burned.

How did you know it was his towel? I asked. There were three or four hanging up there all the time.

It was the only one there when I got home, she said. The maid had done the laundry right before he split.

Wait. When you got home?

Yeah, she said. I was in D.C. when he left. Didn't I tell you that?

I paused. No. What? No. He left while you were away?

She stared at me. He sent me a fucking email, she said.

L
ater that day, after driving the narrow switchback roads from beach to beach, standing knee-deep in azure bathwater drinking Presidente, and coming home to the casita with pink ears and noses and shoulders, we went to the porch as the sun set, and Emma started to cry.

I asked what was wrong.

Nothing worth talking about, she said.

I tried a few jokes without luck. We sat quietly in the awkward wake of those duds, watching ramshackle fishing boats return to port in the half-light. I glanced at her a few times, and her eyes remained wet and red-rimmed.

After a while she looked at me and said, I may need a few minutes.

As I stood to walk inside I tried to make an agreeable sound, a sound that conveyed understanding and empathy, but it came out choked and lame, gave me away. I went into the casita and resolved, in sudden frustration, that if things would always be this way, I would at least write about it and make a lot of money.

I had no idea how right I was. Things would always be this way, and I would make a lot of money.

A
nd though she cried for someone else, someone long gone, someone who'd seen nothing wrong with ending an eight-year marriage via email, I was the one who comforted her, once she finally came in off the porch. I was the one who stroked her hair and held her hand. Kissed the top of her head once and again. That was me. God knows where the hell he was.

E
mma took a long shower, emerged from the bathroom smiling. She asked if I wanted to go out to dinner. By now I'd had a couple of drinks—her favorite, the Emma Original, rum and tonic with a splash of orange juice—and I smiled back, my gratitude at her improved mood magnified by the booze.

I drove us into town. Emma talked and laughed the whole way. We parked the Jeep in a small dirt lot on the
malecón
and worked our way, in the gathering dark, through a mixed crowd of locals and sunburned gringos. We sat down at a tapas place. Emma smiled at me, and nothing else in creation mattered a bit other than that little streetside table, a glass of whiskey for me and an Emma Original for her, distant steel drums, and her laughing at my jokes now, chin down, shoulders shaking, eyes shut tight against her mirth.

T
he earliest known mention of a person enhanced with a prosthesis, believe it or not, comes from the Vedas. We're talking 1500
B.C.
, or thereabouts. A female warrior loses her leg, and is given an iron replacement. We've had 3,500 years to get used to the idea, yet when I talk about the Singularity people still get an indulgent look on their faces, like they're humoring me and my absurd notions of human beings with brain/computer interfaces and titanium exoskeletons. I mean, they're polite about it, usually, which I appreciate. But, you know, 1500
B.C.
The first time a person was joined with a machine, however primitive. Consider that, I tell them, and then ask yourself: who's being naïve, do you think?

O
n our return from Ireland, before the island, before she asked me to leave, Emma and I flew back to Maine and were set to go our separate ways, but shortly after hitting the tarmac we learned that a young man barely out of his teens had taken a Glock to a political meet-and-greet at an Arizona Safeway. It was a sunny day in the desert. People were supposed to be smiling and having their picture taken with a congresswoman, asking her questions about Medicare, but instead twenty people had been shot, including the congresswoman, who'd had a bullet go clean through her head. The FBI had descended and the parking lot was polka-dotted with blood and a girl who'd been born on 9/11 had died with a hole in her chest the diameter of a plum.

At first Emma seemed okay. She handed me her phone as we emerged from the plane, and I read the bulletin. We carried our bags up to the gate in silence and strode through the waiting area and out into the cold. I stopped on the sidewalk to light a cigarette, and we stood there in silence, gazing at nothing of any particular interest: security guards, baggage handlers, a ticket agent sneaking a smoke, people who would always be inconsequential to us except insofar as they kept a tiny part of our world operating so that we could get to where we were going.

After a while I looked at Emma. I wondered what was going on behind her eyes, and then she gave me a clue.

Can you come to my place tonight?

I said Yes, of course.

We loaded our bags into the car, and Emma drove us to her home. Along the way she told me she'd met the congresswoman back in 2005, when she'd worked on a campaign in New Mexico, before the job she had now. She told me she and the congresswoman were neighbors in her apartment building in D.C., had parking spaces next to each other.

We listened to radio reports: The congresswoman was in surgery. The congresswoman was dead. Earlier reports claiming the congresswoman had died were erroneous. Six others were dead for sure, though, including two members of the congresswoman's staff.

Later that night we stood on Emma's porch smoking cigarettes and not talking, when I noticed her flinch visibly at some thought.

I asked her what was the matter.

After a pause she said, I was just thinking. About what it would be like to get shot in the head. About what it would look like.

We didn't talk much after that. We drank until four in the morning, poured bourbon into coffee cups and bundled ourselves in down and Thinsulate and walked to the promenade, the same place where six months before she'd set the whole thing spinning with the simple, lethal act of resting her head on my shoulder. This time, in the bracing cold, we shivered past the scorched foundation of her old home, and we sat on a different bench and she put her head on my shoulder again. Snow wafted down through the orange glow of streetlamps, and we might have been the only two people on Earth, maybe even the only two who had ever existed. Later, in bed, with our fingers and toes stinging as they thawed and a reluctant winter sun beginning to rise outside, Emma lay on top of me and kissed my neck, my chest, let her lips and teeth linger over my nipples, and she fell asleep this way, still lying on top of me with her knees pulled up along my sides, her face buried in my neck, like a child.

O
n the beach, her feet resting in my lap, the tiny brown hairs on her toes: three on the big, two on the next, one on the next, and the two smallest toes bare and capped with tiny unpainted nails.

O
n a rare rainy morning on the island, over coffee mixed with scotch, Emma contended that happiness was the ultimate aim of all human undertaking, ordained in us by nature, written into our very genes.

I bristled at this notion. She smiled at my bristling, unmoved, calmly resolute.

We're happiness ciphers, she said, as if it should be obvious. All of us.

But why? I asked. Why is that automatically our goal? Because it's comfortable?

It's hard, she said, and then, after gauging my expression, more serious: Happiness is hard.

You mean hard to achieve. Not hard to occupy.

Right.

No argument there. But it is also, by definition, comfortable.

A palm frond scraped the window, and she looked over at the sound, thought a moment, shrugged almost imperceptibly, nodded. Sure, she said. This was not a concession of any kind regarding happiness and its merits.

I mean, you've read my novel, I said. Do you think that book ever gets written if I'm happy?

Emma made a show of considering this, moving her head in a manner that was neither yea nor nay.

I tried another tack. Baudelaire said . . . I want to make sure I get this right . . . he said, ‘I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no melancholy.'

Emma smirked at me, lifted her mug, and said, Too bad there aren't any dead French poets here to help me through my day, huh?

And then she took a long, pointed drink of adulterated coffee, her eyes on mine, daring me to offer a response.

T
hat night, after watching movies on the sofa all afternoon while rain pelted the metal roof, we sat at the same table in the kitchen. Over my rum and her bourbon, I put my chin in my hands and said, Don't get me wrong. On my worst days, happiness? Contentment? Hell yes. Give me some of that. Forget the books. I'll go sell fucking insurance. But then those worst days pass. And I want my sadness back.

True to form, she gave no indication of being moved by this in any way. She offered a bare nod. She might have been deeply touched. She might have thought I was silly. There was no way to know.

T
hat night I woke terrified from some nightmare, the details of which were lost the moment it ended. Upright in bed, stiff as raw ore, I felt not merely that I didn't know where I was, but that I was actually nowhere. Like I'd come to in a vacuum, and neither I nor anything else existed any longer. For a while I thought maybe I was dead. As I stared around the void, warm hands reached out. One rested on my waist, the other on my ribs on my left side, pulling me back down, and Emma's voice, drowsy and kind, asked what was the matter, but I couldn't tell her because I didn't know. I followed the hands and found her body, and I lay down again, and her warm sleep smells brought everything back into existence—the mattress underneath us and the covers above, the rain ticking against the windows, the points of light on the main island across the bay, grappling tirelessly with the dark.