Life After Truth

by Ceridwen Dovey

  Eloise tried – and failed – to recall who had given the serious speech at her own class’s commencement exercises, back in 2003. Whatever advice or inspiration the esteemed speaker had attempted to share had gone in one ear and out the other.

  What had stayed with her, however, was the sight of Will Ferrell impersonating George W. Bush as their Class Day speaker (whose brief was to give a funny speech). Compared to President Reese, Dubya now seemed like a cuddly, currant-eyed teddy bear. That’s how badly political life has degenerated, she thought. If Bush and Reese shared anything, it was that their eyes were too close together. Maybe that was the sign of a genetic predisposition to being a crappy president. Will Ferrell had bounded onto the stage wearing a sailing captain’s hat, pretending he’d been invited to speak at a Boston boating association meeting. She and most of her classmates had loved every second, but some of the more conservative parents in the crowd had fidgeted with disapproval.

  Had that really been fifteen years ago?

  When Eloise had first accepted the tenure-track position in the same psychology department where she’d been an undergraduate, then a graduate student, she’d worried that she might always feel an insatiable longing for her more youthful years on this campus.

  Her worries had been mostly unwarranted. She did feel a few pangs each fall, as the students arrived on campus, and the residences bustled with life. And again in the spring, as the undergraduates lugged boxes of belongings to the basement storerooms, and those same buildings emptied out. She remembered how bereft she’d felt each summer, saying goodbye to her blocking group friends.

  But she now also felt some satisfaction seeing the students moving in and out, coming and going according to the university’s dictates, while she and Binx stayed put, rooted in one dear, perpetual place at the very heart of the campus, ensconced within Kirkland House. She had become part of the establishment. She liked being able to play a custodial role, ensuring that being a Harvard student could remain the same in some fundamental way, no matter how much time passed, no matter what else was happening in the world.

  Binx would laugh if she said this to her. There was something slightly reactionary about Eloise’s desire to keep a light lit for the past, for how things had always been done. But Binx hadn’t studied Latin and Middle English. In fact, Eloise decided while she went upstairs to fix her blow-out with hairspray, if anything heralded the age gap between them, it was that those were no longer considered core subjects in the Liberal Arts tradition, essential to cultural fluency. Binx might be a tech guru, but she would not know, as Eloise did, that the word ‘conservative’ originally meant aiming to preserve. Eloise could be a conservative-progressive, couldn’t she? Maybe not. Maybe that was like saying she was old-young, or fat-thin.

  In the bedroom mirror, she inspected her profile in the wraparound dress she’d bought online for the occasion. She’d thought it would flatter the love handles she’d been struggling to banish lately, but the fabric clung to her hips and sagged at her breasts. She should have tried it on the day before, when there would have been time to buy something else. Yet maybe it suited this more frumpy, traditionalist version of herself that seemed to be ascendant. As she aged, she felt that the person she had always known herself to be on the inside was starting to match the person others saw on the outside.

  She left the dress on.

  Her eyes drifted to Binx’s more spartanly populated side of the walk-in wardrobe. Binx had recently given away all her clothes, around the same time she’d cut her long brown hair very short. Binx now had seven versions of the same outfit: a shapeless, granite-colored tunic, which she wore every day, over a long-sleeved top and tights if it was cold or with bare arms and legs if it was warm.

  Binx’s reasoning behind her decision was more complex than just saving her decision-making energy for the important things in her day instead of her wardrobe choices (like Obama did, and Tom Ford, and Mark Zuckerberg), but Eloise had tuned out partway through Binx’s declaration of clothing independence, so she didn’t understand it fully. It seemed to be linked to Binx’s belief as a posthumanist in morphological freedom. Reclaiming the right to do whatever she liked with her body and appearance, and to resist the dominant expectation that people (especially women) should dress in something different every day to gain approval.

  Apparently morphological freedom also meant embracing – somewhat paradoxically, in Eloise’s view – the right to cosmetic, genetic, hormonal, and prosthetic improvements to the human body. At a recent Who-Min-Beans fundraising event Binx had hosted, some of the posthumanist attendees seemed to Eloise to be welded together from plastic and metal. It wasn’t about looking perfect, Binx had tried to explain to her afterward, but about creating a body that functioned perfectly, in a utilitarian sense.

  Though Eloise thought this was extreme, it was, in fact, due to Binx’s influence that she no longer had a period. She hadn’t been on the pill for years – another benefit of dating only women – but Binx had persuaded her to get the same implant she had in her arm, the one that meant you never menstruated, so your cycle could no longer dictate your daily emotions, as if you were just a meat-puppet and your hormones were pulling the strings.

  At first, it had felt liberating, like Eloise was curating a better version of herself. Then one day she’d remembered the joke that had turned her into a feminist, back at college. Someone had told it at a final-club party, apropos of nothing. ‘Why don’t men trust women? Because you can’t trust an animal that bleeds for five days and doesn’t die.’

  Had she gotten the implant, and chosen to stop bleeding, because she’d internalized that male disgust for the female body?

  Eloise would love Binx no matter what she did to her body – whether she bled buckets of blood each month or not a drop – but she missed Binx’s long hair with a very real sorrow. She knew enough not to tell Binx this; if she’d learned anything so far from married life it was that she had to be open to change.

  But how could she forget the first time she had seen Binx naked, how her chestnut hair had covered her breasts as she lay down? The delicious sinfulness of it had been heightened by the fact that Binx was, at the time, a student in Eloise’s packed Principles of Pleasure class, which had become so popular among the undergraduates that she’d had to institute an application-essay process.

  Even before she’d noticed Binx sitting in the front row, flirting with her so openly, so confidently, that it had made Eloise believe it was okay to give in when Binx came to her office hours, closed the door, and kissed Eloise more passionately than she had ever been kissed – before all that, she had taken note of Binx’s peculiarly lucent application essay. It was about Binx learning how to be happy from the novels of Walker Percy, a writer with whom she felt a connection because she’d been named after a character in his most famous novel, The Moviegoer.

  Eloise had read the essay out in its entirety at their wedding, to nervous laughter from some of the guests – the ones who hadn’t known that Eloise had once been Binx’s professor (or hadn’t approved). Now all she could remember from Binx’s essay were the final lines, something about her namesake, Binx Bolling, having nothing to do on Ash Wednesday but see how people stick themselves into the world, and helping them along in their dark lonely journeys.

  Eloise could hear voices downstairs in the living quarters; the musicians must have arrived.

  Binx would be home soon, after a day of drinking at her fifth-reunion bar crawl, not that Eloise’s classmates would be any the wiser – the alcohol already efficiently processed by Binx’s plump, 26-year-old liver.

  That was another delineation between their generations. Binx and her friends still lived in the land of binge drinking, so it was impossible to tell the alcoholics from the social drinkers. For the late-thirty-somethings in Eloise’s cohort, the alcoholics were now hard to miss, red-faced and confused about where everybody else had gone, all the heavy social drinkers they’d camouflaged themselves among, who go
t less numerous and then disappeared altogether as people’s middle-aged constitutions no longer let them get away with what they used to. The insomnia, the racing heartbeat at midnight, the hellish hangovers, all of it had forced them to ask themselves, Is it really worth it?

  Eloise had suggested that she and Binx host welcome drinks for the five-year reunionees too, on the Wednesday before the reunion, since very few of them seemed to have jobs that required them to be in an office, or in fact to work weekdays. Binx had decided against it. Her classmates did not like to plan ahead, she said, and their memories of college were still too fresh for them to be able to embrace being back in a house master’s residence without feeling nervous.

  Eloise understood what she meant by this. Each reunion erected another barrier between the reality of college life and the recollection of it. Eloise had mostly forgotten about the anxiety, but if she really dug deep, she could recall feeling pressure to impress the house masters in her own time, when they had some say over her future: there were grants and senior fellowships for which they nominated students. Once, after speaking to the Kirkland master’s wife, who did not ever stop talking about Goethe and romantic poetry, she’d rolled her eyes and been mortified to see the master noting her reaction.

  Eloise knew from her study of hedonics that the social masks everybody puts on to go about their business are useful and necessary, but the key to happiness is being able to foster a private self and sharing it with those you trust. Unfortunately this is also the key to getting hurt. It was the great unsolved mystery of her field, why the things that make us happiest also make us unhappiest. Like alcohol. And family. And spouses. And children.

  There was a decision Eloise needed to make before Binx got back. A dilemma. Should she hide the 3D-printed model of her own brain, before the party started? It had been Binx’s one-year wedding anniversary present to Eloise, created from an MRI scan, and it was on prominent display in the living room.

  This brain gift had been the start of Binx’s consuming passion to build an avatar modeled on Eloise herself – inspired by posthumanist star and tech titan Martine Rothblatt’s creation of BINA48, a social robot based on her wife Bina’s consciousness.

  On that front, there was no dilemma: the silicon bust of Eloise’s head and shoulders filled with wires and facial motors in the place of veins and flesh would remain out of sight from her classmates, locked in Binx’s home laboratory downstairs. Instead of a crazy woman in the attic, she and Binx housed a fembot in the basement.

  Her name was Elly+. She could move her face, open and close her eyes, and ‘think’; she could even hold a conversation. Eloise had cooperated – collaborated, really – on Binx’s project for a year and a half now, enduring the hundreds of hours of interviews in which Binx had recorded Eloise’s memories and narratives about her life, to begin capturing her personality. An impossible task, yet Binx undertook it as the ultimate labor of love, believing she could distill Eloise’s essence the way perfume was made from rose petals that had been crushed and purified until only the oils were left. According to Binx, as the technology of future-consciousness-transfer was developed in the years to come, Elly+ would become a more and more realistic double of Eloise.

  To Eloise’s discomfort, Binx had even recently launched a Twitter account for Elly+. Her first robot-generated tweet had been: I want to fix the worlds problems.

  To which someone had replied: Start by putting apostrophes in the right place!

  Eloise had found herself feeling – briefly – more tender toward Elly+ for such a human mistake.

  But most of the time, Eloise felt deeply ambivalent about Elly+’s presence in their home. Sometimes Elly+ felt like her punishment for marrying someone who was so very different from her, who didn’t seem to see that the project of creating Elly+ might, over time, detract from their relationship as a couple.

  Prospection – the ability to anticipate what would make your future self happy – was one of the most reliable indicators of how happy a person would be in their life. Binx had it in spades. What the studies didn’t go into, though, is whether the partner of someone with excellent skills of prospection also had a happier life. What if, in every couple, there was only space for one of the spouses to think of her future self and make them happy? What if Elly+ ended up making Binx happier than Eloise herself could?

  Something Eloise hadn’t shared in her entry for the Red Book was that the day after she’d proposed to Binx, five years ago, she had – in a loved-up fit of spousal care – put the dress Binx had been wearing that night through the wrong cycle in the washing machine. It had come out shrunk to the size of a doll’s dress, and it had felt as if the universe was laughing at Eloise proposing to a child of 21.

  The ten-year age gap hadn’t bothered her until that moment, and it still didn’t seem to bother Binx in the slightest. To the contrary, their age-foreignness had often fueled their attraction. Their best sex always happened after a social encounter where Eloise had watched Binx through imaginary glass, as if she were an exotic creature. Eloise knew that over time, the age gap would become less of a thing: 26 to 36 should already feel more similar than different, because they were both now fully adults, yet somehow it didn’t. But one day it would be hardly worth remarking on: at 56 to 66, or 66 to 76, they would both have become invisible older women.

  The problem was not really their respective ages. Eloise knew that. But it was easier to pin it on that than to confront the real issue, which was that Eloise was a humanist and Binx was a posthumanist. Or transhumanist. As far as Eloise could tell, the two terms seemed to be interchangeable.

  Eloise believed that all humans were capable of discovering their purpose in life, and their shared dignity, through a commitment to self-awareness and self-growth, and acceptance of their limitations. Binx, on the other hand, believed that accepting the ‘human’ condition was a crime – why should we have to suffer in our bodies, grow sick, and die? Human intelligence, in her view, should be used to transcend those limitations, to enhance our biology and intellect using whatever technological means we have at our disposal, until we pass into the more desirable state of being posthuman.

  Eloise had initially assumed it would be a phase that Binx tired of quickly. She had a track record of making dramatic U-turns in her life: she’d been ordained as a nun at 17, come out at 19, declared herself a radical socialist at 20 and a proponent of cybercapitalism at 21. She had to give Binx credit; this posthumanism thing really had stuck.

  This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, except for the issue of Elly+. And the surrogate. She shivered. Her womb contracted a little. She decided not to think about it for another moment, not tonight.

  The decision was made. She would move the model of her brain to the study, out of general view.

  As she went downstairs, she reminded herself that, at some stage that night, she should make a toast to Rowan and Mariam’s fifteenth wedding anniversary, which was the following day.

  It was a peace offering, too. She knew she shouldn’t have stolen their limelight at their previous reunion, when she proposed to Binx the same night as their ten-year wedding anniversary. Mariam and Rowan had taken the blocking group to that cheap Mexican restaurant in the middle of nowhere, when they’d all wanted instead to be at the reunion event, in the thick of things. Later, back on campus, Eloise had seen the crestfallen look on Rowan’s face as she got down on one knee before Binx on the dance floor, a circle of people forming around them, clapping and cheering.

  She had rained on his parade. Rowan had not really ever had much to elevate him above his similarly brilliant, overachieving peers except that he’d had the great good fortune to meet his ‘soul mate’ (why did she always use that term with mental quotation marks?) on the very first night of college, when he’d laid eyes on Mariam at the freshman ice-cream social held in the Yard. They weren’t even drunk at the time: the newly arrived freshmen, even the rebellious ones, didn’t yet know where to get alcohol illegally.
They’d had to make do with chocolate ice-cream and soda pop for a sugar high.

  The thing that had set Rowan apart in that crowded field was that he’d made his own wish come true. He hadn’t been the first Harvard undergraduate to get a perfect GPA or to make Phi Beta Kappa or to do a million high-pressure extracurriculars or to volunteer every weekend at the soup kitchen for the homeless in the Square. But he had become the first student of the Class of 2003 to propose to his partner, and get married, right there on campus, paying an exorbitant fee to hire Memorial Church on the weekend after commencement.

  His pride in this distinction was woven into the fabric of his being. For Mariam, it was different – Eloise’s beef was not with her. She knew that Mariam had had a difficult relationship with her father, had never felt cherished by him, and so it made sense that she responded well to Rowan’s obsessive ardor. And Mariam had not built her whole identity around dating the same guy all through college and then marrying young, marrying first. She had seemed a little embarrassed about it back then, apologizing to the others for eclipsing the already significant group experience of graduation with something as personal as a wedding.

  Rowan had always had the ability to get under Eloise’s skin. She should be old and wise enough by now to laugh about it. And, most of the time, she was.

  In the living room, the pre-party atmosphere was palpable – gone was the afternoon ease of an hour ago. There was an electrical charge to the air. She assumed it was because the guests would soon start arriving, but then she saw Juliet and Binx chatting on the couch.

  So that’s what it was. Jules had arrived. The caterers and bartenders and musicians had noticed, but were trying to pretend they hadn’t noticed, and so were going about their duties with theatrical flair.