Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles (18 page)

A
t Duffy's the television over the bar was set, as always, to CNN. I nursed an Emma Original and watched footage of revolts in the Middle East and a segment that made me glad the sound was off, about how the human penis once bore spines but had lost them over the course of millennia. My eyes, in search of something less appalling, wandered to the ticker at the bottom of the screen:
Children forced to work 15-hour days
, it read.
Let it grow: Clapton's guitar on sale.
And then:
American man missing, feared dead in Caribbean
.

The bartender, a big bespectacled gringo named Lyman who never learned my name and always called me buddy or chief, came over and asked me if I needed a refill.

Sure, I said, still staring at the television screen.

He swiped my glass from the bar, rinsed it under the tap, and set about mixing another rum punch. You just get to the island? he asked.

Beg pardon?

He looked up from his work, and no recognition registered in his eyes as they settled on me. I asked if you just got here. Haven't seen you around before.

I hesitated. Something occurred to me, suddenly, and I said, Yeah. Just got in today.

Lyman set the drink in front of me. What happened to your face? he asked. How'd you get the broken beak?

Again, I balked.

After a moment Lyman held up his hands. No problemo, he said. None of my business anyway. There's plenty of gringos on the run from something down here. You'll fit right in.

He rapped his knuckles on the bar, twice, then turned around to wash glasses.

I finished the rum punch quickly. I wanted to go home and get online and find out what this missing American business was all about, so I asked for the check.

Can I settle up? I asked Lyman.

Sure thing, buddy.

He went to the register, punched a few keys, and when he slapped the check on the bar in front of me I automatically pulled my debit card halfway out of my wallet before deciding, after a moment's thought, to pay with cash instead.

I
t's possible that after the Singularity the machines will see us not as a threat, and not as obsolete, inferior versions of themselves, and not as kindly soft-headed grandparents—but as gods.

Perhaps they will travel out into the universe, far beyond where we could imagine going, and when they inevitably encounter other intelligent life they will spread the gospel, as it were, of humanity, impart their creation myth—which will, of course, not be a myth at all.

It's also possible that, driven by motivations we cannot conceive of—in the same way groundhogs cannot conceive of what motivates humans—the machines will in their travels bring self-replicating strands of RNA to some distant planet they consider suitable for their purposes, and they will seed that planet with the RNA and observe, over eons, as life takes hold, first as bacteria and protozoans and algae, and then, gradually, more and more complex organisms, until, in a slow and inefficient manner it is difficult to believe the machines would have patience with, intelligent life finally emerges. In a very real sense we will be gods to this new form of organic intelligence as well, whether they know it or not.

And then this new intelligence will, much as we did, begin figuring things out. They will learn to make and yoke fire. They will invent the wheel, or something like it. Discovery and invention will continue until, assuming they aren't exterminated (either by one of the myriad dangers in an endlessly hostile universe or by one of their own creations), this version of organic intelligence will experience their own Singularity, thereby becoming gods themselves.

And so on.

I
slipped into the casita quietly, leaving the lights off, and found my way in the dark to the kitchen, where my laptop sat on the bar. I punched my name into Google, and an instant later sat staring at a screen full of briefs about my own death.

CNN's piece featured a photo of the island's police force—all three officers—standing aside their cruisers at the end of Mosquito Pier as a crane hoisted the Jeep from the water. According to the article, one of these officers had noticed the broken guardrail the morning after I'd driven off the pier. Something so obvious and glaring that even the Keystone Kops on the island couldn't miss or ignore it—but then, I hadn't been trying to hide anything. I was supposed to be dead.

Now, though, a new possibility, which had taken seed in my mind the moment Lyman failed to recognize me at the bar, began to blossom.

I was presumed a suicide. The police speculated that the current had carried me off, which explained, to their evident satisfaction, the lack of a corpse. Chief Morales told reporters he was waiting for my landlord to arrive from the main island with a key to the house, after which they would inspect my living quarters to try and turn up some explanation of what I'd done and why, so that my friends and family might better understand.

I knew that the real reason they hoped to turn up an easy explanation was so they wouldn't have to do any more work, so the gringo reporters and cameramen would go away, leave them to settle back into their ineptitude.

And it was precisely that ineptitude, I was beginning to think, that might make it possible for me to stay dead.

I would have to leave a note—something, as I mentioned, that I had failed to do when intending to actually kill myself, but something that seemed essential now that I planned to fake doing so.

It gets a little convoluted, I know. Imagine how I felt.

I tore several blank sheets from my notebook, still there where I'd left it next to the laptop, and wrote quickly, my messy script made messier still by fervor and the relative darkness. I wrote to my mother, my sisters, to Dwayne and Hankie, and then, when it came time to write to Emma, my hand paused over the page.

And I wondered, could I really do this? Could I really stay away from her? If one were going to fake being dead, it went without saying that one had to do it consistently. There could be no waffling. And I had demonstrated that, when it came to Emma at least, I was a world-class waffler.

But the alternative—slinking to the police station and announcing my continued existence, confessing what I'd tried to do (there was no way to spin driving off a pier at high speed as an accident, as far as I could see), suffering the attendant fifteen minutes of dubious fame, then returning home and having to explain myself to my mother, my sisters, most of all to Emma, who I knew would be furious in her relief and would not have interest in or time for any explanation—that did not exactly appeal, either.

I considered, as my hand continued to hover over the notebook page, that I had already spent a good chunk of my life—the majority of it, in fact—separated from Emma. Years, while we led entirely discrete lives, seeing each other in passing only once or twice on every trip around the sun, when we might share half a drink at the bar and chat for a few minutes while Matty loomed somewhere in the background with other friends of theirs. I'd become adept at hiding the tumult that occurred inside me at the mere sight of her. I assumed a preternaturally calm, smooth, neutral persona, one so convincing that she'd told me more than once that during those years she was convinced I didn't really care about her one way or the other.

I'd been apart from her, in that way, for almost two decades. Why should this be any different? I'd done it before, I could do it again.

So I wrote to Emma. Stripped away every bit of artifice I'd girded myself with over the years, and fucking wrote. I realized, at a certain point, that I was holding my breath. By far the best piece of scribbling I've ever managed.

I still loved her. There was never any denying that. But it is amazing, isn't it, what we can learn to live with, or in this case without. A simple equation, really: time plus grief, multiplied by base human failure.

I reasoned that I could once again do that math.

I
've mentioned that after the Singularity, most people will choose to slough off the limitations and frailties of the physical body. Ray Kurzweil and others believe this will occur by the turn of the twenty-second century. By then the vast majority of us will exist as digital consciousnesses. Without bodies, the only way to die will be to choose to. It follows that suicide, in this new reality, will consist of simply having our selves erased.

There will likely be one important difference between corporeal suicide and digital suicide. Right now, one cannot destroy oneself utterly. We can blow our heads off, get the chatter to stop and cease having to pay bills, but we persist in the minds of those who knew and loved us. We continue to appear to them, unbidden, in myriad ways. They recall our smiles, hear our voices, jolt from frightening dreams and reach for us on reflex before remembering that we are no longer there. Until they themselves are gone, they continue to suffer the chafing pang of our absence.

But when we all exist as pure thought, we can be deleted not just from ourselves, but from the minds of everyone. With a keystroke (or its post-Singularity equivalent) parents will be spared grief, lovers loneliness, friends the pain of having known and knowing no longer. When we choose suicide, we will choose not merely to destroy ourselves, but to never have existed. In this way, the one compelling argument against suicide—the anguish it causes to those left behind—will be eliminated.

And we are already, today, nibbling on the front edge of such a paradigm shift. Consider this recent news: EU legislators have proposed laws granting people the right to erase personal information from social networking sites. If passed, these laws will let people force Facebook, Twitter, and the like to behave as though they never existed.

The sanctioned shorthand for this proposal? ‘The Right to be Forgotten.'

Which is as apt and succinct a description of suicide as any I've ever read.

I
left everything, save the clothes I wore, my watch, and around eighteen hundred dollars in cash. I felt a twinge of regret at abandoning the draft of my novel, malformed failure though it was. It may have been self-involved and plotless and incomplete, but I had labored on it honestly, and aside from Emma it was all I knew. But everything had to go, and not just for the purposes of feigning my death. Some part of me, the part that was steering the ship, recognized that.

There was no way for me to know, at the time, that leaving behind the manuscript would be the best career move I'd ever made.

A
nd it came to be that Roberto, the man who had run me off the bridge, the man whom I'd repaid by beating him badly enough to put him in the hospital, would be the only person on Earth who knew I was actually alive.

I went to him that night, walking clear across the island while dogs howled in the hills all around me. It was nearly dawn by the time I reached Roberto's house. I checked my watch and discovered it had stopped working, the crystal clouded with vapor. I unhooked the strap and tossed it in the bushes, then reconsidered—the watch could be discovered and possibly linked to me—and spent several minutes locating it in the twilight.

Why Roberto? Well, first, who else did I know? But beyond that I reasoned that here was a rare bird, a wholly trustworthy man who, because of what he'd been in a former life, must have known the sorts of untrustworthy people I would need to make my disappearance actual. This was a bare hunch, but I had seen on Roberto's face that drinking wasn't the only thing he'd given up nineteen years ago. He'd been rough. He'd done bad things, had most likely been involved with the island's small circle of organized criminals, a cabal that stole boats and dealt crack and regularly and systematically stripped casitas of everything that wasn't nailed down. If I'd picked a fight with this younger version of Roberto, I probably would have been the one who ended up in the hospital.

I went through the gate on the chain-link fence, wincing as it creaked and rattled in the stillness of the early morning. Several taps on the aluminum security door produced no response, so I made a fist and pounded three times, then stood and waited while roosters began shrieking at one another all over the barrio.

After a long moment came the dull click of tumblers rolling in the lock, and then Roberto stood looking at me through the bars of the security door, half-asleep and incredulous, wearing only boxer shorts. He had one of those enormous bellies that do not hang like flab but rather jut out aggressively, as though he'd swallowed a pony keg.

What is this? he asked, but despite his incredulity, despite the rude hour, he turned the deadbolt and swung the security gate open to let me in before I'd offered any explanation of why I was there.

R
oberto listened in silence as he stood at the gas range making coffee for us in the island style—with a saucepan, at a simmer.

When I was finished he said, You want to be someone else. I understand this.

He didn't understand perfectly. I wanted simply to be gone, not to be someone else. But his imperfect understanding was sufficient for my purposes. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, having intuited the way in which he'd reinvented himself all those years ago, that he had no objection to my disappearing. What he did object to, though, was leaving Emma behind.

You love her, he said simply, slicing the air with one hand as if this were the beginning and the end of the discussion.

It's a hell of a lot more complicated than that, I told him.

Maybe, he said, but his expression, and the way he moved his head back and forth, indicated that he did not believe any complication was sufficient to excuse abandoning her. Maybe.

What about you? I asked. You're such a proponent of love.

What is this?

I mean if you believe in love so much, where is yours?

Roberto turned toward me with the saucepan in hand, poured steaming coffee into two mugs on the table, then settled into his chair and looked straight at me.

She die, he said finally, clapping his hands together lightly and then raising them overhead to indicate the ascension of this departed woman. He looked at me with a sad smile, the expression of a man who long ago came to accept the pain of such a loss as a fixture in his internal landscape.

Can I ask how?

He hooked one thumb toward a closed door opposite the kitchen table, behind which his son lay sleeping.
El parto
, he said, still smiling. Miguelito birth. So I have no choice, see. You, you have a choice.

We didn't say anything after that, just sat looking at one another. I understood his point, of course—life had a nasty habit of stealing things from us irretrievably; we didn't need to rush to get rid of them ourselves—but what I ended up feeling, once again, was the exact opposite of Roberto's intent.

Because I'm sitting there looking at him, right, and that smile is still on his lips, even through our silence, and I'm thinking this man clearly felt for his wife what I felt for Emma, and when his wife died and left him alone with an autistic child who would never be able to care for himself, Roberto not only weathered his grief but let it mold him into the calm, decent, happy person seated across from me, a man who sacrificed himself daily, and through that sacrifice made himself whole.

But I didn't want to be whole. I didn't want to be calm, or decent, or happy. The best I can say for myself, at the time, was that I wanted to want to want all those things. There was a distance between Roberto and I, and his wise, wistful smile, no matter how hard-earned, couldn't bridge it.