Some Possible Solutions (2 page)

In those early years, I'd sink into a black mood come mid-April. I'd lie in bed for a couple of days, clinging to the sheets, my heart a big swollen wound. Tem would bring me cereal, tea. But after the kids were born I had no time for such self-indulgence, and I began to mark the date in smaller, kinder ways. Would buy myself a tiny gift, a bar of dark chocolate or a few daffodils. As time went on, I permitted myself slightly more elaborate gestures—a new dress, an afternoon champagne at some hushed bar. I always felt extravagant on that day; I'd leave a tip of thirty percent, hand out a five-dollar bill to any vagrant who happened to cross my path.
You can't take it with you
and all that.

Tem tried hard to forget what he'd heard, but every time April 17 came around again, I could feel his awareness of it, a slight buzz in the way he looked at me, tenderness and fury rolled up in one. “Oh,” he'd say, staring hard at the daffodils as I stepped through the door.
“That.”

I'd make a reservation for us at a fancy restaurant; I'd schedule a weekend getaway. Luxuries we went the whole rest of the year without. Meanwhile, my birthday languished unnoticed in July.

Tem would sigh and pack his overnight case. We sat drinking coffee in rocking chairs on the front porch of a bed-and-breakfast on a hill in the chill of early spring. Tem was generous to me; it was his least favorite day of the year, but he managed to pretend. We'd stroll. We'd eat ice cream. Silly little Band-Aids.

My life would seem normal—bland, really—to an outside observer, but I tell you that for me it has been rich, layered and rich. I realize that it just looks like 2.2 children, an office job and a long marriage, an average number of blessings and curses, but there have been so many moments, almost an infinity of moments—soaping up the kids' hair when they were tiny, walking from the parking lot to the office on a bird-studded Friday morning, smelling the back of Tem's neck in the middle of the night. What can I say. I don't mean to be sentimental, but these are not small things. As the cliché of our time goes,
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain
. This is no time to go into the ups and downs, the stillbirths and the car accident and the estrangement and what happened to my brother, but I will say that I believe the above statement to be true.

April 17. I'd lived that date thirty-one times already before I learned about April 17, 2043. Isn't it macabre to know that we've lived the date of our death many times, passing by it each year as the calendar turns? And doesn't it perhaps deflate that horror just a bit to take the mystery out of it, to actually
know
, to not have every date bear the heavy possibility of someday being the date of one's death?

I do not know the answer to this question.

April 17, 2043. The knowledge heightened my life. The knowledge burdened my life. I regretted knowing. I was grateful to know.

I've never been the type to bungee jump or skydive, yet in many small ways I lived more courageously than others. More courageously than Tem, for instance. I knew when to fear death, yes, but that also meant I knew when not to fear it. I'd gone to the grocery store during times of quarantine. I'd volunteered at the hospital, driven in blizzards, ridden roller coasters so rickety Tem wouldn't let the kids on them.

But December 31, 2042, was a fearful day for me.

“Are you okay?” Tem said after the kids had gone home. We'd hosted everyone for a last supper of the year, both children and their spouses, and our son's six-month-old, our first grandchild, bright as a brand-new penny. At the dinner table, our radiant daughter and her blushing husband announced that they were expecting in August. Amid the raucous cheers and exclamations, no one noticed that I wasn't cheering or exclaiming. The child I'd miss by four months. The ache was vast, vast. I couldn't speak. I watched them, their hugs and high-fives, as though from behind a glass wall.

“Oh god, Ellie,” Tem said painfully, sinking onto the couch in the dark living room. “Oh god.”

“No,” I lied, joining him on the couch. “Not this year.”

Tem embraced me so warmly, with such relief, that I felt cruel. I couldn't bear myself. I stood up and, unsteady with dread, limped toward the bathroom.

“Ellie?” he said. “You're limping?”

“My foot fell asleep,” I lied again, yanking the door shut behind me.

I stood there in the bathroom, hunched over the sink, clinging to the sink, staring at my face in the mirror until it no longer felt like my face. This would become a distasteful but addictive habit over the course of the next three and a half months.

Aside from the increasing frequency with which I found myself falling into myself in the bathroom mirror, I got pretty good at hiding my dread. From Tem, and even, at times, from myself. We planted bulbs; we bought a cooler for summer picnics. I pretended and pretended; it felt nice to pretend.

Yet when Tem asked, on April 10, what I'd planned for this year's getaway, the veil fell away. Given the circumstance, I had—of course—neglected to make any plans for the seventeenth. Dread rushed outward from my gut until my entire body was hot and cold.

Panicking, I looked across the table at Tem, who was gazing at me openly, boyishly, the way he'd looked at me for almost four decades. Tem and I—we've been so lucky in love.

“Tem,” I choked.

“You okay?” he said.

And then he realized.

“Damn it, Ellie!” he yelled and hit the table.

I quietly quit my job, handed in the paperwork, and Tem took the week off, and we spent every minute together. We invited the blissfully ignorant kids out for brunch (I clutched the baby, forced her to stay in my lap even as she tried to wiggle and whine her way out, until eventually I had to hand her over to her mother, a chunk of my heart squirming away from me). Everything I saw—a fire hydrant, a tree, a flagpole—I thought how it would go on existing, just the same. Tem and I had more sex than we'd had in the previous twelve months combined. Briefly I hung suspended and immortal in orgasm, and a few times, lying sun-stroked in bed in the late afternoon, felt infinite. What can I say, what did we do? We held hands under the covers. We made fettuccine Alfredo and, cleaning the kitchen, listened to our favorite broadcast. I dried the dishes with a green dishcloth, warm and damp.

3.

On the morning of April 17, 2043, I was astonished to open my eyes to the light. Six hours and four minutes into the day, and I was alive. Petrified, too scared to move even a muscle, I wondered how death would come for me. I supposed I'd been hoping it would come mercifully, in the soft sleep of early morning. I turned to Tem, who wasn't in bed beside me.

“Tem!” I cried out.

He was in the doorway before I'd reached the “m,” his face stricken.

“Tem,” I said plaintively, joyously. He looked so good to me, standing there holding two coffee mugs, his ancient baby-blue robe.

“I thought you were dying!” he said.

I thought you were dying
. It sounded like a figure of speech. But he meant it so literally, so very literally, that I gave a short sharp laugh.

Would it be a heart attack, a stroke, a tumble down the basement stairs? I had the inclination to stay in bed resting my head on Tem, see if I might somehow sneak through the day, but by 10 a.m. I was still alive and feeling antsy, defiant. Why lie here whimpering when it was coming for me no matter what?

“Let's go out,” I said.

Tem looked at me doubtfully.

“It's not like I'm sick or anything.” I threw the sheets aside, stood up, pulled on my old comfy jeans.

The outside seemed more dangerous—there it could be a falling branch, a malfunctioning crane, a vehicle running a red light. But it could just as easily catch me at home—misplaced rat poison, a chunk of meat lodged in my throat, a slick bathtub.

“Okay,” I said as I stepped out the door, Tem hesitant behind me.

We walked, looking this way and that as we went, hyperaware of everything. Vigilant. I felt like a newborn person, passing so alertly through the world. It was such an anti-death day; the crocuses. Tem kept saying these beautiful, solemn one-liners that would work well if they happened to be the last words he ever said to me, but what I really wanted to hear was throwaway words (all those thousands of times Tem had said “What?” patiently or irritably or absentmindedly), so eventually I had to tell him to please stop.

“You're stressing me out,” I said.

“
I'm
stressing
you
out?” Tem scoffed. But he did stop saying the solemn things. We strolled and got coffee, we strolled some more and got lunch, we sat in a park, each additional moment a small shock, we sat in another park, we got more coffee, we strolled and got dinner. Mirrors and windows reminded me that we were a balding shuffling guy hanging on to a grandmother in saggy jeans, but my senses felt bright and young, supremely sensitive to the taste of the coffee, the color of the rising grass, the sound of kids whispering on the playground. I felt carefree and at the same time the opposite of carefree, as though I could sense the seismic activity taking place beneath the bench where we sat, gazing up at kites. Is it strange to say that this day reminded me of the first day I'd ever spent with Tem, thirty-eight years ago?

The afternoon gave way to a serene blue evening, the moon a sharp and perfect half, and we sat on our small front porch, watching cars glide down our street. At times the air buzzed with invisible threat, and at times it just felt like air. But the instant I noticed it just felt like air, it would begin to buzz with invisible threat once more.

Come 11:45 p.m., we were inside, brushing our teeth, shaking. Tem dropped his toothbrush in the toilet. I grabbed it out for him. Would I simply collapse onto the floor, or would it be a burglar with a weapon?

What if there had been an error? Remembering back to that humble machine, that thin scrap of paper, the cold buttons of the keypad, I indulged in the fantasy I'd avoided over the years. It suddenly seemed possible that I'd punched my social in wrong, one digit off. Or that there had been some kind of systemic mistake, some malfunction deep within the machine. Or perhaps I'd mixed up the digits—April 13, 2047. If I lived beyond April 17, 2043, where would the new boundaries of my life lie?

Shakily, I rinsed Tem's toothbrush in steaming hot water from the faucet; it wouldn't be me lingering in the aisle of the drugstore, considering the potential replacements, the colors.

We stood there staring at each other in the bathroom mirror. This time I didn't fall into my own reflection—Tem, I was looking at Tem.

Why had it never occurred to me that it might be something that would kill him too?

In all of these years, truly, I had never once entertained that possibility. But it could be a meteorite, a bomb, an earthquake, a fire.

I unlocked my eyes from Tem's reflection and grabbed the real Tem. I clung to him as to a cliff, and he clung right back.

I counted ten tense seconds. The pulse in his neck.

“Should we—?” I said.

“What?” Tem said quickly, almost hopefully, as though I was about to propose a solution.

“I don't know,” I said. “Go to bed? It's way past our bedtime.”

“Bedtime!” Tem said as though I was hilarious.

11:54 p.m. on April 17, 2043. We are both alive and well. Yet I mustn't get ahead of myself. There are still six minutes remaining.

 

SOME POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS

The MyMan Solution

I'm not one to hide MyMan away in the intimate parts of the house, the bedroom, the bathroom, the places where interactions are most likely to occur. I like it when MyMan sits at the kitchen counter. I like it when he lies on the white leather couch.

People do judge you for it, though. If your MyMan is sitting there on the white leather couch when friends come over for nuts and martinis, they'll say, Jesus Christ! Is that really necessary. Please, spare us.

And even though you may stand up for yourself at first, even though you attribute their disgust at least in part to jealousy, after enough harassment (it's true, it's true, he's not wearing a scrap of clothing) you dismiss him, and he rises with his permanent slight smile—a very mysterious smile, an odd wondrous smile, lips parted just enough to let in a woman's tongue—and bumbles his way down the hallway behind his big ever-erect cock, his lean blue athletic form here and there bopping up against the walls (oh my, the length and strength of his legs!), because the ambulatory function hasn't yet been perfected (not that I'm complaining).

Then, after that, your friends can sit back and enjoy their martinis. Your loneliness doesn't seem to bother them in the least.

Well,
ha
to them! What I like about MyMan is his hard blue penis coupled with the outcropping above it that vibrates against my clit. I've never had this kind of experience before. He never goes soft, he never gets tired, boredom isn't in his register. In the months since I acquired him we've been coupling three, four, five times a day. There are serious health benefits, you know, to this sort of behavior. Seriously, they're visible. In my skin, primarily. You should see my face.

But that's not the only thing I'm talking about. Also I'm talking about his eyes. Twin mirrors reflecting me back at myself. What I've found extra beautiful these past months is when I can see myself in his eyes and then he blinks his lashless lids (every four seconds, programmed for verisimilitude) and I can't see myself and then he opens his eyes and I can see myself again.

And his arms. I'm talking about his arms. His hands. The sculpted plastic musculature, right down to the thick, visible veins running up his forearms. This plastic—it's not plastic as I've ever known it—there's something soft about it—so terrifically smooth—better than skin.