Life After Truth

by Ceridwen Dovey

  Of all the magical days on their trip, that one had been touched with special grace. Their relief at having survived the night had made their senses more acute, and deepened the intimacy between them. Jomo remembered how the air down in the lushly vegetated crater was still cool, how peaceful it was – green walls rising above them, enclosing them. Reading about it in his Let’s Go guidebook, he’d thought he might feel claustrophobic down there, trapped in an accident of geography, a bowl of earth from which animals could not escape, but it had been the opposite. It was a place he had never wanted to leave.

  The abundance of wildlife had been astounding: hippos, hundreds of wildebeest, buffalo, hyena, jackals, rhinos, impala, and lions surveying the fertile domain from an outcrop of rocks. They’d seen a pregnant cheetah resting in the shade, and two male zebras fighting, trying to bite each other, and a baby rhino following its mother. Jules had identified a pair of dik-diks, small antelope that mate for life and only ever have two babies. She had smiled as she watched the family of four timidly stepping through the dewy grass. An elderly male elephant – at least sixty years old, Mburi had said – with tusks so large he could rest them on the ground, had stood across the road, blocking their way for a long time, as if to make a point.

  So many people had asked Jomo, on his return to New York, what the highlight of the trip had been. It would have been easy for Jomo to tell the bushpig story at his own expense, and follow it with a description of their morning at the bottom of the Ngorongoro Crater, spinning it into a mythical yarn that anybody who’d seen The Lion King would be able to visualize. But he’d never told anybody else about the bushpigs, or that morning on the floor of the crater, because he wanted to keep those memories just between him and Jules.

  Jomo stopped to drink from a water fountain along the path. He was close to MIT by now. The sunlight was glorious after the endless winter they’d had in New York, and he was tempted to take off his shirt. Then he remembered he had the ring in his breast pocket. He touched it through the fabric, and the accusing gem pushed back against his fingers.

  While he and Jules were both waiting to use the bathroom that morning (Mariam and Rowan had been in there forever with the girls, who’d shrieked their protests at having their hair washed), he’d invited Jules to come jogging with him, but that morning she was speaking on one of the panels organized by the alumni association. The topic of the panel was ‘Women in Entertainment in the #MeToo Era’. He hadn’t known she was doing this – in the online program, there had been only an amusing placeholder term, ‘intellectual content’, for the Friday morning’s official events.

  Jules had insisted he go for his run and meet her afterward for lunch. But he should have gone with her to the panel. He knew she disliked doing that kind of thing but felt obliged: Harvard had let her in, therefore she felt she should say yes to anything they asked of her in return.

  Even after more than two decades of being famous, Jules still wasn’t comfortable with her role as a shadow diplomat. She’d become an actress because she liked slipping into other people’s skins, but as a result of her fame she was constantly asked her opinion on things of national, even international, importance. She did have good ideas about things like global governance, but she had learned over the years that people did not really want her to answer their questions honestly. They didn’t want a thoughtful or complex against-the-grain answer. They wanted politico-speak or liberal-speak; they wanted her to mouth the sentiments of a mildly left-leaning Hollywood star but not go any further.

  Why hadn’t he gone with her to the panel? Jomo took off again along the path, at an even more punishing pace. He knew why: because he was upset she had forgotten it was his birthday today.

  None of his blockmates had remembered, it seemed. He couldn’t blame Rowan and Mariam, who were overwhelmed by parenting duties, and Eloise had a lot on her plate too, hosting the welcome drinks, and promoting her book. All he’d received so far that morning was a call from his parents and a flood of automatic ‘Happy Birthday!’ messages on Facebook, which meant nothing.

  But for Jules to forget really did hurt.

  On her most recent birthday, in December, he had visited her on set in New Zealand. Not wanting her to think he had gone too far out of his way to be there, he’d said he was keen to buy some pounamu, a distinctive, non-precious gemstone, with a bright green color like limeskin when polished.

  She had been in the middle of filming on a small, very avantgarde film, which she’d told him was about the many forms of revenge people take on one another for perceived wrongs, from the most personal to the political. In the climactic scene, a corrupt leader was pulled apart – drawn and quartered, like in medieval times – by those he had wronged. By the end of the day’s filming, Jules had been slimy with fake blood.

  It was the type of project she seemed to have been increasingly drawn to in the last year and a half. When she had finally reconnected with him after the lost months, she’d said she had been overseas doing pre-production and scouting for locations for a film about Russian interference in elections around the world, which she was planning to direct as well as act in. (In Tanzania, unable to help himself, Jomo had paged through her passport while she was napping. There were no foreign stamps for any of those months, no evidence she had left the country then at all.)

  The production in New Zealand had been amateurish in comparison to the film sets he was used to visiting. It had worried him. He knew that as actresses aged, the roles available to them – completely unfairly – began to shrink, and he had wondered if Jules’s turn away from the more commercial movies she’d made earlier in her career, toward low-budget, indie productions, was a reflection of that.

  Jules had always said to him that she would have to reinvent herself all the time if she wanted to have staying power in an industry with such a short-term memory. Her success had come to her in her mid-teens, as the heroine of a series of films based on comic books that had been popular back in the 1940s, about a girl who could make herself invisible to fight evil enemies. But the heroine’s invisibility (and anonymity) came at a price, for she never got any credit for making the world a better, safer place.

  Jules had invited him to visit her on that spectacular set, while she was filming the final sequel in the series, during the summer between their sophomore and junior years. It was in Toronto, in a giant warren of soundstages. He’d had to get through five separate security screenings before they’d let him into her dressing room. That first time, Jomo had never been on a set before. Everything was exactly as he’d imagined: a chair with her name on it, towering cellophane-wrapped hampers filled with candy and fruit, flowers everywhere.

  Jules had done her best to put him at ease, even as she was being attended by a squad of stylists for her next scene. He’d sensed they did not want him there, that his presence threatened their ability to properly prepare Jules for what she needed to do, which was become someone else for a while. Watching her being outwardly transformed – by the make-up, the wig – he’d found himself wondering: once she’d made space for these other selves in her consciousness, did she ever succeed in kicking them back out?

  And then, after she’d been spirited away by her handlers, he had screwed up by walking straight across a soundstage covered with sand in intricate patterns, leaving his big clumsy footprints behind. The whole production had lost a half day of shooting as the sand was swept and re-patterned; even the director had taken a moment out of his busy schedule to curse at Jomo. It had been mortifying.

  Jules found it funny, and he was relieved that nobody blamed her for inviting an inexperienced friend to visit. She was adored on set, and rightly so, for being kind to everybody from the bottom of the food chain right up to the top, often baking cookies and bringing them to the crew on night shoots even when she wasn’t scheduled to appear in a scene herself.

  It had been a useful ‘learning inflection point’, to use the language of his mostly useless MBA, to see how a workplace
could become impenetrable to outsiders. A film set was an extreme example, of course, because it consisted of bringing together loosely affiliated people for a short amount of time and putting them under extreme creative pressure. But it was one of the mistakes he felt he and his original business partner had made.

  They’d met at business school. In the excitement of their rapid initial success after launching House of Riehl Luxury Jewelers, they’d become more and more insular in how they operated. They’d treated outsiders as threats instead of opportunities, as if everybody they met wanted to steal a piece of the action, or had ulterior motives. All along, it was his business partner who’d been the snake in the grass, though it had taken Jomo a while to see it. His partner had wanted to keep others out because he didn’t want any scrutiny of how he was managing the company’s finances, a responsibility Jomo had ceded to him all too willingly so that he could get on with being a gemologist.

  At least he hadn’t let Jules talk him into letting her wear one of the company’s signature pieces on the red carpet. It was one of the few decisions from that time he didn’t regret. She’d wanted to support him with the media exposure, but he’d stayed strong and said no, though each time it had been the occasion for another fierce bust-up between him and his business partner. And thank God he had – somehow – kept a clear enough mind to know it would ruin something between them if he ever asked Jules for a favor like that.

  The path diverted away from the tree-lined river for a stretch, forcing him to run beside the busy Memorial Drive.

  A truck drove past covered with words of meaningless wisdom: Harmony is good for the soul. True sincerity is unfakeable. If you want a meaningful life, make meaning in somebody else’s. Along the side of the truck was the phrase ‘OUR MINERAL WATER IS MILLIONS OF YEARS OLD’. A company that sold water in plastic bottles was trying to put a positive spin on being the face of wrongdoing in the environmentalist era.

  Jomo had drunk hundreds of bottles of mineral water in his life, if not thousands. He was definitely responsible for a portion of the giant plastic trash vortex, wherever it now happened to be floating in the ocean, choking turtles and seabirds.

  Jesus. He focused on his breathing again.

  Why was he always searching for signs these days, clues that he was on the right path in his life?

  It made him feel marginally better to admit it was not a new thing. He’d always been susceptible to suggestions that one’s destiny was writ large, if you knew the right place to look. The first real romance he’d read as a young teenager, after all, had been Romeo and Juliet, and he had been indelibly marked by the idea that, if lovers could be star-crossed, it was also within the stars’ power to give their blessing. It had been heartening to think that finding his soul mate was not really within his power – it was about waiting for the stars to align.

  The very first conversation he’d had with Jules had been about this, more or less – the sappiness more forgivable at age 19 than it was at 38.

  His freshman fall, he’d decided to take one of the longest-running Harvard courses, a science core called Astronomy 101. The two professors who co-taught it, both eminent astronomers, were getting on in years, and there were whispers it might be the last year they’d be up to the task. It was a mega-class – hundreds of students packed into a Science Center auditorium for lectures – but the weekly discussion sections were broken down into groups of ten.

  Jomo was told to meet the section instructor at midnight at the small observatory station built on top of the Science Center’s flat roof. It was all rather cloak-and-dagger, but this was why the course was popular.

  On the cloudless night in question, Jomo had studied until late at Lamont Library, then walked across the mostly empty campus to the Science Center. When he reached the observatory, the instructor was talking to a very beautiful girl with blonde hair and pale skin, who looked as if she was wearing a bulky winter coat over pajamas. At first, Jomo thought she looked familiar because he knew her from high school or something, and he’d smiled at her warmly, waiting for his brain to remember her name, and then it had: This is Juliet Hartley! In her pajamas!!!

  Jules must have been used to this response, because she’d ignored Jomo’s sudden woodenness and taken notes as the instructor, a shaggy-bearded grad student, showed them how to use the telescope to make observations of Neptune.

  They had half an hour, the instructor said, before the next pair of students would arrive to use the telescope, and then it was up to Jomo and Jules to show them how to do it; he was going home to bed.

  Jules had taken charge, plugging in cords and turning knobs. She opened up the shutter in the dome, which creaked and groaned until it ground to a halt, revealing a small circle of the night sky. She consulted a thickly bound manual – the Astronomical Almanac, which listed planetary positions – and said something he couldn’t understand about celestial coordinates.

  Jomo had been unable to do anything useful, stunned to be in such close proximity to a woman whose life experience, even at her young age, was so much more complicated and interesting than his own.

  She had figured out how to use all that equipment without even breaking a mental sweat. It would have taken him the entire night to get it set up if he’d been there alone. Am I too dumb to be at Harvard? he’d wondered. Too dumb to ever impress the extraordinary woman beside me?

  Jules had swapped out the telescope’s eyepiece, explaining to Jomo that it was best to use the one with the widest field of view, and located Neptune with ease. ‘There it is!’ she’d exclaimed. ‘It’s so tiny. Hardly distinguishable from a star with this old telescope. It’s in opposition right now, which means the earth is directly between it and the sun. It rose at sunset and will be up all night, so I don’t know why we had to come at midnight. To test our commitment to the class, I guess.’

  When Jomo looked through the eyepiece, his eyes had taken a while to adjust. Jules stayed close beside him to help him focus the lens, and that was when he’d first noticed that her hair smelled like lavender and lemons. It had been difficult for him to concentrate on the miniature bluish dot of Neptune, floating at the outermost edge of the solar system.

  They’d taken some measurements, and filled in a worksheet for the class, and then they’d waited for the next two students to arrive.

  ‘What star sign are you?’ Jomo had asked her, and regretted it instantly. He’d just been trying to make conversation, but the question seemed nosy, intrusive, as if he were fishing for her date of birth.

  ‘Sagittarius,’ she said, not seeming to mind the question. ‘And you?’

  ‘I’m a Gemini. Our star signs are similar. We like being independent.’

  ‘You really believe in that stuff?’

  ‘Sort of,’ he said. His parents had bought him a subscription to Astrology All-Stars for his eighteenth birthday, not something he had told any of his friends back home in DC. One of the dilemmas posed by his new life at college had been whether to update his subscription so it was sent to him at Harvard, risking the mirth of his new roommates.

  Jules was paging idly through the almanac, looking at the numbered charts and diagrams. ‘Do you remember when Voyager 2 did the fly-by of Neptune, in 1989?’ she said. ‘My parents let me stay up all night to watch the PBS special.’

  ‘Mine too,’ Jomo said. ‘My favorite part was when they played the children’s voices on the golden record Carl Sagan put on the Voyager. The one with messages for aliens.’

  ‘My mother actually helped to write the text for President Carter’s greeting on that record,’ Jules said. ‘She was one of his cultural advisers in the late seventies. She’s still getting over her disappointment that I went into acting instead of setting my sights on becoming the first female president.’

  She glanced shyly at him, and Jomo had understood she was waiting for him to ask what the message had been. ‘Do you remember it?’ he said.

  And then, as if wrapping an unseen cloak around her shoulder
s, she had stepped into character and been transformed into a graceful lone envoy sent from earth into space.

  ‘This is a present from a small, distant world,’ she had recited in her mellifluous voice, looking directly at Jomo, as if he were the extraterrestrial she had been sent to find. ‘A token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.’

  Jomo had slowed down his running pace without realizing it, caught up in this dense net of recollections – we are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours – and all of a sudden, he was overtaken by another jogger on the path.

  From the back, the guy looked familiar, but it was only when two Secret Service agents came jogging after him that Jomo realized it was Frederick Reese.

  Fred had not recognized him. Or maybe he had, and decided to overtake Jomo on purpose, as an act of one-upmanship.

  Looking at Fred’s wide shoulders, his easy gait as he accelerated into the distance, Jomo felt the same old frustration: of all the final clubs Fred could have joined at college, why had he picked the Spee? Now that Fred had shown the world his true colors, the fact that he’d once been president of the Spee had become a mark against them all.

  The night before, Jomo had been relieved that Fred wasn’t at the club, and he’d hoped it might mean he wasn’t coming to the reunion, assuming he wouldn’t be welcome. But of course that was not how these things worked. Fred would always be made to feel welcome here.

  Many of their classmates – except for the ones who’d been brave enough to publicly note their contempt in the Red Book – were probably thrilled at having Fred among them. Fred’s status and power, even if it was in support of wrongdoing, made certain types of people feel that they too had status and power, by association. They’d all dined out on stories of what he’d been like at college, even if they hadn’t known him well.