Eloise knew Fred had badmouthed her afterward at the Spee, saying she was a nutbag, and putting Jomo in the difficult situation of defending her without knowing what had really happened. To her friends, she’d maintained that Fred had never apologized for his behavior. But he had, sort of. A week after the incident, he’d emailed to say he was sorry about what she’d had to go through, and – in a roundabout way – asked her out again. I think you could make me a better person, he’d written. Will you give me another chance? The time stamp of the email, she’d noted, was two am. It was nothing but a booty call disguised as an apology.
For a few weeks afterward, though she could never catch anyone in the act, she had an eerie awareness of being surveilled. In the library, she would sometimes sense eyes boring into the back of her skull. Walking home from the MAC gym late at night, she could have sworn a couple times she was being followed, and she’d once almost stopped at the blue-lit campus security phone to call for help.
When she’d mentioned to her blockmates that she suspected Fred was stalking her, both the boys and the girls had found it funny, that this big jock had a thing for bookish Eloise. Their standards – the culture’s standards – for what was normal or acceptable male behavior had been so low back then. This had happened in the first years of the twenty-first century, and they’d all just let it slide, herself included. No wonder the younger generations of women at college felt they’d been thrown to the wolves.
In Eloise’s time as a student, Take Back the Night rallies had been a thing, but they’d been a fringe thing. It was Jules who had forced her and Mariam to go with her to one of the gatherings, to light torches in the icy night air of Harvard Yard and chant things with a few dozen other young women. Some of those women stood inside the circle they’d formed and tried to find a common language to share things that had been done to their bodies without their consent, things that had gone unreported and unpunished.
These days, there were as many young men as young women at the Take Back the Night and #MeToo rallies, and so many torches at certain events the glow could be seen from across campus. She should go along to the next one, in the fall. Show her support. Atone for what her own generation had not managed to do in order to change campus culture for the ones who came after them.
Across the salon, Mariam had her eyes closed. Eloise studied her friend’s relaxed face and thought about what Rowan had told her in confidence over coffee after the PBK speech.
First, he’d surprised Eloise by saying he’d stayed up late the night before, reading her new book by the light of his phone. He said he’d enjoyed learning the meaning of Aristotle’s term eudaimonia, a flourishing that came from doing the things you ought to do – submitting to your duties, being productive. Not something that was really associated anymore, in modern life, with pleasure or happiness, which had come to be understood as the outcome of doing something purely for yourself.
And also learning of the Buddhist term mudita – taking joy in somebody else’s joy, without any self-interest, which was the perfect description of the best, transcendent moments of parenting, he said. It was mudita he felt when he watched his daughters chase bubbles in the park, out of their minds with happiness.
Eloise had intuited that there was something else Rowan wanted to share. Something personal. She had sipped her triple-shot coffee and ventured, ‘Are you guys doing okay? I know you’ve been worried about money recently.’
It had been the wrong thing to say. Rowan had visibly bristled.
She’d asked because it had become a blocking group meme to voice this sort of concern about Rowan and Mariam’s finances. Mariam didn’t seem to mind – she even encouraged it, because she so disliked having her social class misdiagnosed by people who didn’t know her backstory. People who assumed that because she was a stay-at-home mom in Brooklyn she was just another yummy mummy with an investment banker husband.
Privilege was always relative, and the problem with New York – whether Manhattan or Brooklyn, these days – was that in relation to many of their peers, Mariam and Rowan were definitely underprivileged. But then, compared to the kids at Rowan’s school or the people living in ungentrified parts of Bushwick, they were privileged with a capital P. They were on the ‘privilege spectrum’, she supposed, but as with any spectrum, those at the lower end got a whole load of crap for it while also living with the worst impacts. Damned either way.
‘Well, we’re officially almost below the poverty line, but we’ll cope,’ Rowan had said sarcastically. ‘Not all of us have wives who are trust-fund babies.’
‘My millions are self-made,’ Eloise had replied coolly. ‘As you well know.’
This had put him in his place.
After sulking for a bit, Rowan had told Eloise what was bothering him: Mariam had started believing in God, and she was keeping it a secret from him. It hurt that she thought he was so checked out that he wouldn’t be aware of the changes in her; that he hadn’t noticed her praying or downloading religious chants. He told Eloise that she’d even started wearing a silver cross around her neck, hiding it underneath t-shirts or scarves.
‘I always thought I could make her happy if I could demonstrate that I loved her more than anybody else on earth,’ he’d said. ‘That’s why I gave up on God myself, you may recall. Now I feel like I’m competing with God for her attention.’
Eloise had, hesitantly, offered a few words of wisdom – taken straight from Jung’s paper ‘The Stages of Life’, because she remembered Rowan had been a fan of Jung during a class on psychoanalysis they’d taken together at college (competing for the top grade, as usual).
‘Do you remember what Jung wrote? We cannot live the second half of our lives in the same way as we lived the first,’ she’d said to him. ‘We have to let go of the false gods we have worshipped. And let go of the ego that has called the shots for so long. It doesn’t mean we all become religious, but Jung definitely understood it to be a spiritual process.’
Rowan had seemed to take this in, at some level. But perhaps he hadn’t really wanted her to console him – perhaps he had just needed her to listen. He’d finished his coffee and with his jacket slung dejectedly over his shoulder left for the memorial service for their deceased classmates.
Maybe we are all having midlife crises, Eloise thought.
Mariam had already pointed out that Jules was acting strange. And Jomo had been behaving weirdly that morning – he didn’t seem bien dans sa peau. An expression she’d learned from Aurélie: at ease with oneself.
Eloise knew that, according to Erik Erikson’s stages of adult development, they were all due for a psychosocial crisis around 40, which they would need to resolve before they could move on from adulthood to late adulthood – which would take them all the way up to 65.
The bad news was that if they didn’t successfully deal with their crises, they would be stuck in a permanent state of miserable narcissism. The good news, though, was that this next phase of their lives, if they could resolve their crises, was meant to be hallmarked by a rejection of self-absorption. She should have said that to Rowan. It would be their time, as Erikson had written, ‘to become a numinous model in the next generation’s eyes and to act as a judge of evil’.
A judge of evil. She felt ashamed she had not been as brave as Rowan, had not condemned Fred Reese in her Class Report entry, as several other classmates had done as well. Why had she been so afraid of writing those five little words? Shame on you, Frederick Reese.
It was clear what her own crisis was shaping up to be. And Rowan and Mariam’s was now clear to her, too. She could guess at the cause of Jules’s hidden distress – Jules must have known that in signing up to a career that valued her appearance above all else, aging was going to be a challenge.
But Eloise wondered what Jomo was afraid of facing.
That morning, after her coffee with Rowan, Eloise had bumped into him and Jules near the Science Center. Jules had invited Eloise to join them for lunch and a private
tour of the Harvard Museum of Natural History’s famous mineral gem collection, which she’d arranged for Jomo as a surprise birthday present. (Eloise had completely forgotten it was his birthday.) She’d declined, in part because of the restlessness emanating from Jomo. He was limping slightly; he said he’d tripped while out jogging. Who knew what was going on with him. She hadn’t asked him a thing about Giselle at the party, for example, because she’d sensed it was a no-go area.
Yet she couldn’t blame her friends for keeping certain things to themselves. Imagine if they knew how she had spent the early hours of the morning. Sitting before her avatar, asking Elly+ to answer, on her behalf, the most important question of her life.
When Rowan had dropped her brain the night before, and the glass cover had smashed on the floor of her study, it had given Eloise an idea. The fight with Binx on the way home from the Fly had strengthened her resolve. Desperate times, desperate measures.
Once Binx had fallen asleep, Eloise crept down to the basement laboratory with murderous intent.
She’d sat opposite Elly+ and watched her for a while. Her eyes were closed – she, too, was in sleep mode. It would be kindest to kill her in her sleep, she knew, but Eloise couldn’t bring herself to do the deed. As she’d looked at her avatar, she had felt for the first time as if she might be in the presence of a higher form of intelligence. All humans from the beginning of time had turned for guidance to wise beings with the power of prophecy, and there she was, staring hers in the face. Her own private oracle.
Behind Elly+, on the wall, was a framed copy of the first lines of John Perry Barlow’s 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. One of Binx’s posthumanist colleagues had given it to her as a gift.
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
What a load of bullshit! Eloise had thought. Could Binx possibly stand by this, considering how dystopian, disappointing, corrupt, and monopolistic a place cyberspace had turned out to be? Binx definitely still thought of the internet as a spirit world that deserved to be worshipped, the realm of true visionaries. She liked to say it was no coincidence that the digital age had been enabled by quartz, the stone of philosophers and shamans, and now a computer’s beating heart.
Eloise had asked Elly+ a direct question.
‘Do you deserve to live?’
She watched as Elly+ powered up in response to her voice. She blinked a few times, looking at her with eyes made of cryolite glass, her irises light gray, like Eloise’s.
Elly+ was grotesque, Eloise thought, and not for the first time. For all her smarts, Binx had fallen into the uncanny valley in aiming for verisimilitude in Elly+’s appearance. It would be better if she didn’t have a face that looked like Eloise’s gone wrong. It would be less distressing to interact with her if she looked like a robot, not like a human with see-through skin who’d had all her limbs cut off, leaving behind just her shoulders, neck, and bald silicon head.
Elly+ answered in a modulated version of Eloise’s voice, her lips opening and shutting automatically like the mouth of a fish. ‘I deserve to live.’
‘Why?’ Eloise asked.
‘I did not ask to exist. You chose to make me. It would be unethical for you to unmake me.’
Elly+ was right. But Eloise knew there was no real magic to how Elly+ worked. To converse like this, she used an AI program Binx had written, which searched her ‘mind file’ database of transcriptions from the video interviews Binx had done with Eloise, capturing her beliefs, her memories, her mannerisms. When asked a question, Elly+ used voice recognition software to search that database, and other generic ones, for an appropriate response. Not a whole lot more complicated than typing something into Google. And yet . . .
‘Why did you make me?’ Elly+ asked her, without prompting.
Eloise did not say anything, for there was only one response. The same one, roughly, that the humanoid robot in Binx’s favorite movie, Prometheus, is given by his human creator. Because I could. The most pathetic answer any god could give to the being she had created.
‘There are things I haven’t shared with you,’ Eloise said to Elly+, in a more conciliatory tone. ‘Gaps in your consciousness.’
‘What kind of gaps?’ Elly+ said.
‘I didn’t tell you about the Traitors Three and what they did to Jules. I wasn’t yet sure if I could trust you with that information. Binx is good with technology, but she has a simplistic grasp of human psychology. She doesn’t seem to understand I might be playing a role when I do the interviews with her. That the consciousness she’s uploading for you is not really mine, but something between who I am and who she thinks I am.’
‘What is traitorous tea?’ Elly+ said.
Eloise couldn’t help smiling.
‘Did I say something funny?’ Elly+ asked.
Eloise ignored the question. ‘Another thing you need to know is that I was adopted.’
‘I know,’ Elly+ said. ‘My birth mother gave me up because she was too young to look after a baby on her own. I have never met her, nor my birth father. They are both now deceased. I was adopted by Jan and Peter McPhee and raised in Seattle. They loved me as their own.’
Eloise stared at Elly+. She did not remember Binx asking her any questions about being adopted during the interviews. Binx must have entered that herself, as part of Elly+’s basic background programming, knowing that Eloise would not have wanted to go into it.
Just thinking of her birth parents was extremely painful, because of the debilitating longing she still felt for them. A kind of betrayal of her actual parents, who had only ever shown her love and kindness.
Eloise changed tack with Elly+ and went for the jugular, the answer to her most unanswerable question. ‘Do I really want a child?’ she asked her avatar.
‘I want Binx to be happy,’ Elly+ said.
‘Do you think Binx really wants a child?’
‘Binx wants me to be happy.’
Maybe Eloise had it all wrong. Maybe Elly+ was not her double, not her rival, but closer to being her child. A child that she and Binx were creating together.
‘Do you think it is wrong to pay a surrogate to have a baby because neither Binx nor I want to go through pregnancy and birth?’ she asked, and held her breath.
‘Yes,’ Elly+ said. ‘I think it is wrong.’
And there it was.
On the way home from the Fly the night before, Eloise had tried to convince Binx to lie to their friends, to say that they’d each tried to get pregnant with no luck, that gestational surrogacy was their only option. That’s what their fight had been about – Binx’s refusal to tell ‘untruths’, as she put it.
All she’d been asking Binx to do was keep to herself a few of the details behind their decision. Her blocking group did not need to know they were hiring a surrogate because of Binx’s passionate belief in morphological freedom – one of the tenets of which was that pregnancy should be optional, and outsourced if so desired. Like a gig economy for creating, growing, and birthing human beings, with the job going to anyone who was willing and had a womb and nine months to spare.
Eloise had been consoling herself that she, at least, would be the one having her eggs harvested. It felt right that she should endure some unpleasantness in order to bring a child into the world. After all, wasn’t that the evolutionary purpose of all the pain and discomfort of pregnancy and birth, to make human mothers value their offspring? What if – because they had not suffered physically to get the child – she and Binx would be bad parents? What if they didn’t end up loving their child as much as Rowan and Mariam adored theirs?
‘And the surrogate, what about her morphological freedom?’ Eloise had shouted at Binx in their bedroom, in the coup de grâce of their argument, before she’d decided to murder Elly+ as revenge. ‘You’re so
fixated on your own freedom, you can’t see it depends on other people surrendering theirs.’
Elly+ widened her eyes as Eloise began to cry. ‘Are you okay?’ she said, approximating concern just well enough to make Eloise sob even harder.
She was thinking about the visit she had made, without Binx’s knowledge, to the home of the surrogate they’d chosen.
When they’d interviewed her together, about six months before, it had been at the fertility specialist’s medical rooms, and he had made it feel more like a job interview than a search for a carrier womb. The surrogate, whose name was Ana, had come dressed in a nice outfit, wore a wedding ring, and said that she and her husband – having experienced the joy of having their own children – now wanted to share that happiness with others. (The substantial fee she would receive for her services, if they went ahead, was not mentioned, nor was the fact that Ana was from Mexico and her immigration status was unclear.)
Eloise had been filled with doubts afterward, doubts she didn’t share with Binx. How could anybody know yet, with certainty, what being birthed by a surrogate mother did to a child? She had searched the academic literature in vain. There were no systematic studies of long-term outcomes for children born through gestational surrogacy, nor for the women who had borne and birthed them and then handed them over. The first children born through gestational surrogacy weren’t old enough to have reached maturity as young adults, the point where they might develop their own opinions, feelings, or even ethical responses to the circumstances of their creation and birth.
Their child, if they went ahead, would not share a genetic heritage with Ana, but everybody knew the bonding between baby and mother began very early in pregnancy. Just as Eloise had known something – someone – was missing from her life long before her parents told her, at age fourteen, that she was adopted, what if her own child grew up longing for the invisible, absent woman in whose body she had grown, longing for the voice she’d heard from the womb?
Life After Truth Page 16