Goodbye for Now (29 page)

Before David’s users, the projections had mostly looked vibrant and healthy. They hadn’t done much technology sick. Some had died too suddenly.
And some just hadn’t made time for it. They were dying, after all. David’s users had been dying for a long time, so they’d died online too. They’d e-mailed and Facebooked and video chatted and texted and everything else as they got slowly, steadily, miserably worse. Noel Taylor, for instance, just looked like crap.

“Hey man,” Noel answered, a little bit out of breath, the first time Josh called him up. “You look great. Good day?”

“Yeah, I guess,” said Josh.

“The thalidomide’s working finally?”

“Or the extra prednisone.”

“Where’s your bili at?”

“Three and dropping.”

“Awesome,” said Noel. “Hell, maybe it’s the booby smoothie.” Josh’s acupuncturist had told him that the antibodies in breast milk might attack the T-cells responsible for the graft-versus-host disease which was a complication of the bone marrow transplant that was supposed to be saving his life but so far wasn’t. He talked his neighbor into pumping an extra eight ounces for him every few days in exchange for the gardening she no longer had time to keep up with now that she had a newborn. Josh put the breast milk in a blender with honey, raw garlic, brewer’s yeast, and rosemary. Noel argued that it wasn’t worth it—he chose death instead—and in his heart Josh knew that probably wasn’t what was working, but he still winced when Noel brought it up. When Noel said it wasn’t worth it, what he meant was don’t get your hopes up. What he meant was already I am sick and exhausted, palpated and shot, filled up and drained out, promised and lied to, retaining optimism and making a will, living and dying; I can’t add breast-milk smoothies to the list. If it worked though, Josh knew, Noel would have given anything to try it. But Noel had already given everything.

“I look like shit.” Noel considered himself in his own mini-window. “My mom’s coming out tomorrow. I’m going to scare the crap out of her looking like this.”

“Talk to them. Get them to give you a shot of EPO or something,” said Josh, as he had in life.

“They’re just going to put me on antidepressants.” Noel was right about this. That was exactly what they’d done. “And they’re not going to work. I’m not clinically depressed. I have cancer. It’s depressing.”

“That it is, my friend,” said Josh. Even the second time around, he didn’t know what else to say.

“But you look great, man,” said Noel. “You’re giving me hope. That’s the most important thing.”

Almost everyone in the salon looked up from their projections to shoot Josh a commiserative smile. They got Noel’s joke too. They were used to this mantra, all of them: nothing more important than hope. Josh could think of a few things, a
reason
to hope being chief among them, not hoping just as a thought-experiment.

“Buck up,” he told Noel. “You don’t want to scare your mom. I’ll talk to you soon. Sorry you feel like shit.”

“That’s okay,” said Noel. “You were just trying to help. I forgive you.”

Josh hung up and went up to the front counter to talk to Sam.

“How’d it go?” said Sam. “First time’s always hard.”

“It went pretty well,” said Josh. “But at the end this really weird thing happened. I said I was sorry he felt like shit. And he forgave me.”

“Oh crap,” said Sam. “I thought I fixed that. Sorry about that. It does that sometimes.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I thought I’d worked it out. Evidently not. Sometimes when you tell it you’re sorry about something, it automatically forgives you, even if that’s not the kind of sorry you meant. It’s like it’s hardwired for absolution.”

“That’s kind of nice,” said Josh.

“Language is nuanced,” said Sam. “We appreciate your patience.”

Meredith was working on a model of the Hindenburg when Sam walked in. “Bad day?” he guessed.

“What makes you think so?” She was painting tiny details along the blimp’s tail.

“Never mind.”

“David’s users are going to make my head explode,” said Meredith.

“I had a hunch.”

“I’m not kidding,” she said, unnecessarily, for Sam knew she wasn’t. David’s users’ projections talked only about dying. They’d lingered. They
had electronic memory—a lot of it—of being sick, of tests coming back with very bad news, of treatments worse than cures. They’d haunted chat rooms and online support groups and Facebook pages promising miracle cures. They’d stalked far-flung doctors over e-mail who were running experimental trials. Their friends and family were legion and waiting for news of their every breath, news which was much better communicated electronically than any other way. Their long-distance loved ones wanted to lay eyes on them every day. In short, their electronic archives grew as their lives dwindled. The less life they had ahead, the more they recorded, however unwittingly, what they had left. So the archive was voluminous, but it was also miserable.

Sam went to the closet to pull out more paints.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going to help you paint.”

“You don’t use poster paint for models. And the Hindenburg wasn’t pink.”

“I’m not painting the Hindenburg,” said Sam, slowly dipping a brush in hot pink poster paint and then using it to carefully outline the tip of her nose. She looked at him like he was insane.

“Are you insane?”

“Too garish?” he said. “Maybe something darker.” He drew a stripe in purple down the right side of her face then a red one down the left. Then he started in on small yellow circles around and around and around her chin.

Meredith looked like she might cry. She looked like she might laugh. She settled on both at once. Then she dipped a brush in green and started in on his eyebrows.

“You’re going to make me look like the Grinch,” he complained.

“Not even that good,” she said. “More like Mr. Yuk.”

“Mr. Yuk’s whole face is green. His eyebrows are black.”

“My apologies,” she said, and started filling in Sam’s cheeks. They painted each other until they looked like rainbows. They painted each other until they looked like swamp monsters. They painted each other until Meredith stopped crying.

“You are beautiful,” he said.

“Kiss me,” she said.

“I can’t,” he said. “You have something on your face.”

SAY GOODBYE FOR NOW

A
week before Julia and Kyle’s visit, Livvie started talking about coming home.

“Guess what?” she said one night.

“What?” said Meredith.

“If today were tomorrow, I’d be seeing you the day after tomorrow.”

“You would?”

“Of course! You’re picking me up at the airport, remember? Opening Day’s Monday. Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

“Oh … right,” said Meredith.

“Didn’t we just talk about this?”

“Yeah, I forgot. I have a lot on my mind. I remember now.”

“I can’t wait to see you. And to meet Sam finally. And to be home. I miss it there.”

“It misses you too, Grandma.”

“And mostly I miss you! I’m so excited to see my baby.”

“Me too,” said Meredith weakly.

“Listen, would you stop by the market and get me some olive oil and balsamic and a few pounds of that pasta to have around? I pretty well cleaned out the house before I left, and I’m going to need staples.”

“Sure,” said Meredith.

“I have to run babe, but I’ll see you so soon. Bye.”

Meredith looked at Sam from somewhere between incredulous bemusement and profound horror. “Is she torturing me? Why does she think she’s coming home all of a sudden?”

Sam shrugged. “Who knows? Some percentage of your chats were
about her coming home, the airport, what groceries she needed. She’s just cycling through the archive.”

“So it’s random? It just happens to coincide with the end of the season when she’d be leaving again anyway? It just happens to coincide with my parents coming this weekend?”

“Or you said something that triggered it.”

“Make it stop,” she said, an echo of her mother.

“Easy,” said Sam—an allowance, an admission, a warning, a way out. An understatement and an overstatement. “Shut it down. Turn off the projection. Or, hell, just don’t answer when it calls.”

“I can’t do that.”

“You keep saying that, but there are no rules here. We’re making this up as we go along.”

“You don’t get it,” said Meredith. “Just because you made it happen in the first place doesn’t mean you get to kill it when it stops pleasing you. You’re all Old Testament wrathy God, disappointed in what you’ve created, ready to kill it rather than let it get better.”

“I’m not disappointed,” said Sam. “You are.”

“I’m not disappointed. I’m angry.”

“There’s no one to be angry at. She isn’t here anymore.”

“Not at her. At you.” She couldn’t be mad that Livvie wanted to come home—that was a programming quirk. She couldn’t be mad that Livvie couldn’t come home—that was a nasty side effect of fate, biology, and/or cigarette advertising in the forties. She couldn’t be mad at RePose, which was only doing what they’d asked it to and which was inanimate anyway. Never mind the distinction was less trump than it used to be, that left only Sam.

“Why are you mad at me?”

“I don’t know. I’m not. I don’t know.” She walked straight into the bedroom and shut the door. Sam left her alone and watched the Technicolor Hindenburg spin in slow circles in its spot by the kitchen window.

The next day Livvie called to say, “You got my flight info, right? I’ll be home the day after tomorrow. You didn’t reply to my e-mail.”

“It must have gotten lost,” said Meredith. She wasn’t even trying that hard anymore. She’d not quite but nearly stopped playing along.

“That works though, right? That time works for you? If not, I can call a cab.”

“Don’t be silly, Grandma.”

“You’ll be there?”

Meredith couldn’t bring herself to promise her grandmother that she’d see her at the airport, but Livvie seemed okay with the mute nod she got in reply.

“Did you go to the market and get my supplies? Penny might come for dinner Sunday night.”

Meredith nodded again, but Livvie wasn’t buying it. Meredith was not a good liar.

“Let me see,” Livvie said.

“What?”

“Hold the stuff up to the camera. I want to see.”

“It’s in the other room.”

“It’s a small apartment. I’ll wait.”

Meredith looked helplessly at Sam.

He shrugged. “Shut it off.”

“Sam ate it all,” said Meredith.

“Ate it
all
?”

“He was starving.”

“Five pounds of pasta and half a liter of that nice basil-infused olive oil?”

“And the balsamic too. He was very hungry.”

“Wow,” Livvie said, and then just sat and processed for a while. Nothing in her online history prepared her for such epic consumption. “I can’t wait to meet this guy.”

“Him too,” Meredith assured her.

“You got me in trouble with your grandmother,” Sam complained when they hung up.

“Good thing she’s dead, huh?” said Meredith.

“Let’s go to the movies,” said Sam.

“And see what?”

“Who cares?”