Switchback

by Matthew Klein

  They met at the Stanford Shopping Center, an outdoor mall adjoining the university. Ho was waiting for him at the food court, an atrium near the coffee and sandwich shops. He sat at a mesh wire table, with two paper cups of coffee in front of him.

  Timothy approached. Under Ho’s left eye was a purple bruise the size of an eight ball.

  ‘That’s quite a shiner,’ Timothy said. He took a seat across from Ho.

  ‘You’re not going to punch me today, are you, Mr. Van Bender?’

  ‘I suppose that depends.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On whether you’re going to share that coffee.’

  Ho slid a cup across the table to Timothy. ‘So,’ Ho said. ‘I take it you spoke to your wife.’

  Timothy regarded him skeptically. ‘If you’re lying to me, what you are doing is the lowest thing any man has ever done.’

  ‘I’m not lying to you.’ Ho took a sip of coffee, snapped the plastic lid back on the cup. ‘I’m not asking you for any money, Mr. Van Bender. I’ve already received my payment for the backup procedure. I want absolutely nothing more from you: no money, no time, no attention.’ He paused. ‘I am only trying to do what is right. I’m trying to keep the promise I made to your wife.’

  ‘Which was what?’

  Ho shrugged. ‘This isn’t science fiction, Mr. Van Bender. There’s no magic wand I can wave. I can’t bring back the dead. Your wife’s body is … dead. Even if she hadn’t …’ He thought about how to say it, delicately. ‘Even if she hadn’t ended her own life, she would have died shortly because of her illness. That’s the problem with the backup technique. All I am doing is keeping your wife in a kind of non-corporeal stasis. But she is not truly human, not alive in any meaningful sense, as she is currently constituted.’

  Ho continued. ‘Someday, when we have perfected human cloning – and I believe it is only a matter of time – well then, you can imagine the possibilities. Backing up one’s mind, and storing it along with a tissue sample for safe keeping. And then, should an accident occur, or an illness, one would simply restore the mind, re-copy it into a perfectly blank clone, back into one’s own body, as it were. There would be no such thing as accidental death, or sudden illness. Imagine it.’

  ‘That would be pretty nifty.’

  ‘That’s my vision for my company. To be the company that solves a huge market need: death. Obviously it opens up a whole can of worms. Moral and ethical dilemmas. But we could work through those. There would be no stopping the technology. Who doesn’t want to live forever?’

  Ho looked at Timothy, as if waiting for an answer. None came.

  ‘Which brings us to your wife,’ Ho said. ‘You have a difficult choice to make now, Mr. Van Bender. I do not envy you.’

  ‘What kind of choice?’

  ‘Backing up your wife was only half of the plan. Your wife wanted to come back to you, to be with you … physically.’

  ‘Fine. How do we do it?’

  Ho shook his head, as if to say: Mr. Van Bender is not a very smart man.

  ‘Tell me,’ Timothy said.

  ‘As I said, this is not science fiction. There is no way to cure her cancer, or to bring back her dead body.’

  ‘So?’

  Dr. Ho leaned over the table as if to impart a very dark secret. ‘I can restore your wife. But I need a …’ His voice trailed off.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A vessel,’ Ho said. ‘Another person. I can simply overwrite your wife on top of someone else’s hardware, as it were.’

  ‘Overwrite—’ Timothy stopped and thought about it. ‘What happens to the other person?’

  Ho shrugged.

  ‘You kill them?’

  ‘No, no,’ Ho said quickly, looking around the food court, to see if anyone was listening. An obese woman walked by with two fat grade-school children. Ho waited for them to pass. ‘It’s not like that. Their body stays alive. And their mind – well, I can simply perform a backup on that person too, so that when it is scientifically possible, we could theoretically bring that person back, without harm.’

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’

  Ho shook his head. He was not kidding.

  ‘So you want to bring Katherine back in someone else’s body?’

  Ho stared at Timothy without speaking.

  Timothy asked: ‘Whose?’

  Ho raised his index finger. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is up to you. But please allow me to make some suggestions. The person should be young, in outwardly good health. It would be an irony of O’Henry-esque proportion to go through this entire procedure and then learn that the person you chose had some sort of terminal cancer. Of course the person should be a woman; I don’t think you want to live in your house with a bearded two-hundred-pound truck driver. It should be someone you find physically appealing – in the same way that you found your wife physically appealing. And finally, if I may make one more recommendation—’

  ‘By all means.’

  ‘It should be someone you know. Someone who you could legitimately … wind up with, after your wife’s death. What I want to avoid – and forgive my selfishness – is the appearance of anything too unusual, anything that raises too much attention. I’m not ready to market this technology yet. So we don’t want to raise any eyebrows.’

  ‘I see,’ Timothy said.

  ‘Do you?’ Ho asked. ‘Are you sure you understand what a serious choice this is? Choose your vessel with care, because you’re going to put your wife inside. And you’re going to spend the rest of your life with her.’

  ‘Sort of like marriage.’

  Ho said, ‘I have spoken to your wife about this. She is very flexible. She understands that there is no perfect choice. She will leave the decision up to you. She thinks you will choose wisely.’

  29

  As if they were talking about how Timothy might swing by Ho’s lab after a fishing trip to drop off an extra trout he had caught, they agreed that Timothy would find a suitable ‘vessel’ and would phone the doctor on his cell to alert him. Then they would meet at the lab.

  Timothy returned to his car. He drove the black BMW through the mall parking lot, past the housewives walking to their cars and hugging ungainly shopping bags, past the high-school kids at the ice-cream shop, past the burrito joint with the outdoor tables, where the businessmen tucked their ties into their shirts. Looking at them all, Timothy felt uneasy. He could have Katherine back, but he would need to choose someone – a vessel – to put her in. He scanned the shoppers. Whom would he choose? One of the housewives at the mall? One of the young women serving coffee at the Starbucks? The pretty clerk in the bookstore?

  He drove slowly, like an automaton, turning the wheel, signaling with his blinker, stopping at the red light, slowing for pedestrians. When he looked up, he had driven a mile towards home, but the time had disappeared. He felt hollow, parched – a clay cistern filled only with dust.

  Timothy knew why he felt empty. He was about to do something horrible. Even without understanding the details, he knew. He was choosing someone. He was choosing a victim.

  Yet wouldn’t any man, Timothy wondered, do the same? Could any man – anyone who loved his wife, or his family – do different? This is what drives good men to fight wars – to napalm thatch huts, to bomb cathedrals, to talk about acceptable levels of ‘collateral damage.’ There are times when you love someone so much that you must drive the rest of the world from your thoughts. All that matters now: her.

  His wife was coming back. He loved her more than anything, more than anyone. It took her death for him to understand, finally, what she meant to him. She was everything. She was the only woman he had ever loved. She was the only person he had ever trusted.

  Without her, his life would be empty: lonely nights in a dark house, restless sleep, fading recollections of happier times.

  Somehow, faintly, Timothy understood that he was choosing a path that would lead to disaster. But – just as he recognized earlier that afternoon t
hat he would repeat the same failed yen gamble if given another chance – he knew too that, if he relived this moment a hundred times, he would choose the same way each one. He would bring Katherine back, regardless of cost, regardless of result.

  Yes, I love her that much, he thought to himself. I miss her that much. I would do anything. He nodded grimly. Anything.

  By the time he reached Webster Street, just a mile from home, Timothy had decided to put his plan into motion.

  The first question that he needed to answer: Whom would he choose?

  With one hand on the steering wheel, Timothy dialed his cell phone and stuck it to his ear.

  He was surprised when the Kid answered the phone. ‘Osiris.’

  ‘Kid? It’s me. Where’s Tricia?’

  ‘She stepped out. I’m glad you called. We’ve gotten three calls from investors who want to redeem: Sharpe, Johnson, and Hendrick.’

  ‘What did you tell them?’

  ‘That you’d call them when you got back. Where are you?’

  ‘Oh,’ Timothy said dreamily, ‘I just left the mall.’

  ‘The mall? Timothy …’

  ‘We can hold their money for ninety days. Tell them we’ll start the clock now, and then they can redeem.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘So …’ Timothy paused, tried not to seem excited. ‘Is Tricia back yet?’

  The Kid sighed. First his boss was shopping at the mall while the business was crumbling around him, and now he wanted to flirt with the secretary. ‘Hold on.’ The Kid said something in the background.

  Tricia’s voice came on the line. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hey, Tricia.’

  She sounded happy. ‘Hi, Timothy.’

  ‘Remember how we talked about getting together for drinks later in the week?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Well it’s later in the week. What are you doing tonight after work?’

  ‘Nothing. I mean, unless—’

  ‘So let’s have drinks. You know the Dutch Goose?’

  ‘Awesome!’

  ‘Awesome,’ Timothy agreed. ‘See you there at seven thirty.’

  ‘Great.’

  Timothy said: ‘Don’t bring the Kid.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Okay. Bye.’ He snapped the phone shut.

  Yes, he knew right away whom he would choose. Was there ever any doubt?

  30

  The Dutch Goose was a Stanford institution: a bar on Alameda with tight booths, peanut shells on the floor, fresh beer, greasy burgers, and initials carved into tables – decades’ worth of initials – gouged into the dark lacquered wood. They were runes, these initials, mysterious stories of love long lost. Over time the carvings had been lacquered over, once a year when the students left town, brushed with a thick poly gloss so many times that the gouges in the wood had healed, and all that was left was a faint scar, a barely visible story about a young boy so much in love that he needed to record it with pen knife in cedar. The young people that carved these initials had been lacquered over too, by time and distance; they were fat and old now, or far across the country, married to someone else, someone unexpected, and had children, and were living a life different from the one imagined when the love runes were carved.

  What the Dutch Goose meant to Timothy was youth. He loved walking in and feeling the floor under his shoes vibrate from the jukebox. He loved the smell of day-old cigarette smoke and spilled beer. At first he wasn’t certain why he had told Tricia to meet him there, but then, when he entered the place, he suddenly did understand. This was where he would be meeting his wife all over again. This was the restaurant in Greenwich Village where he had proposed, but now he was doing it as a forty-seven-year-old, and now he was the oldest man in the room by at least a decade.

  He saw her sitting in the back – she always sat in the back, he realized, so she could stare at everyone else.

  He threaded through the crowd, mostly students in summer session, a few professors, and went to her. He slid into her booth, and it was so tight that their knees touched. She was wearing a tight black sweater, short-sleeved cotton, and her silver choker. He could smell her perfume, a sweet floral smell, like Katherine’s funeral arrangement. Her glasses were gone – she was now in evening mode, Timothy understood – and she wore lipstick, this time bright red. She was stunning, and he felt happy when he saw her. He knew that he could have her, but on his terms. She would become his wife. Or his wife would become her.

  ‘Let me get you a drink,’ Timothy said.

  ‘A Cosmo.’

  ‘No Cosmos tonight,’ he said. ‘Tonight we’ll put some hair on your chest.’

  He left her before she could protest, and walked to the bar. The bartender, a young blond man, pointed to him. Timothy said, ‘I need two Scotches. Doubles. On the rocks. You have single malt?’

  ‘Macallan’s.’

  ‘Perfect.’

  The bartender poured, and Timothy dropped a fifty-dollar bill on the bar.

  ‘I guess I need change,’ Timothy said. ‘Keep sixteen dollars for yourself.’

  ‘Thanks,’ the bartender said. He raised an eyebrow. He turned and started for the cash register.

  Timothy glanced to his left and right. Two groups of people were talking, one on each side of him, wrapped in their own conversations: a middle-aged couple to his left, talking quietly, possibly arguing; and a group of thin men with glasses and dirty hair, wearing chinos and blue denim shirts – engineer’s uniforms. The engineers talked intently, but did not look at each other. Instead they stared at the surface of the bar as they spoke, as if the wood grain itself were the subject of the discussion.

  Satisfied that no one was watching him, Timothy reached into his pocket and pulled out three blue pills he had retrieved earlier from Katherine’s medicine chest.

  He held them in front of his waist, using the bar to shield them from the bartender’s view. The bartender was oblivious, counting singles into a neat pile on top of the register drawer, trying to work out the complex math implicit in Timothy’s generous tip. The bartender grabbed the pile, licked his finger, and began to count them again.

  Timothy casually dropped the three pills into the drink to his right. He took a red swizzle stick from the bar to mark the glass, stirred it in the drink.

  He turned and glanced over his shoulder at Tricia. She was looking in the opposite direction.

  The bartender returned finally and handed Timothy a stack of bills. ‘Thanks again.’

  ‘I’ll be back,’ Timothy promised. He was about to turn. A hand landed on his shoulder. Someone had been standing behind him. How had he not noticed the person? Timothy looked up and saw a big man in a motorcycle jacket, with a square-cut beard and mustache. The man gestured with his chin at the drink in Timothy’s right hand.

  ‘Hey, pal,’ the biker said. ‘What’s that?’

  Timothy regarded him. The biker weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. There were still a bunch of them around, ex Hell’s Angels, who had come to live among the Northern California redwoods of La Honda or Woodside, near Neil Young and Jerry Garcia, back before the Valley was called Silicon Valley, back when high technology still meant high technology, and revolved around grow lamps and hydroponics.

  ‘What’s what?’ Timothy said.

  ‘That drink,’ the biker said. ‘Looks interesting.’

  Timothy turned to Tricia. Now she was looking at him, intrigued by Timothy’s new, beefy friend.

  ‘Listen,’ Timothy said softly. ‘I don’t want any trouble.’

  ‘You don’t, huh?’ The biker turned to look at Tricia. He regarded her for a moment, then turned back to Timothy and smiled. The biker grabbed a swizzle stick from the bar, stuck it in his mouth like a toothpick. He chewed. ‘Okay.’ Then: ‘It’s just that the drink looks good. What’s in it?’

  ‘Macallan’s. Can I buy you one?’

  The biker smiled. ‘Make it two.’

  ‘You got it.’

  Timothy or
dered. He opened his wallet and put another fifty down on the bar in front of the biker. ‘You mind taking care of the tab?’ Timothy asked.

  ‘Not at all.’

  Timothy returned to the table with the two drinks.

  ‘Who was that?’ Tricia asked.

  ‘Local color.’

  ‘Were you fighting over me?’

  ‘I told him I had a black belt. Scared him off.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Gucci,’ he said. ‘Alligator.’ He slid the swizzle-sticked drink across the table.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Scotch. Drink up.’

  ‘Are you trying to make me drunk, Mr. Van Bender?’

  ‘Absolutely.’ He raised his glass of Scotch. ‘A toast.’

  She wrapped her hand around her glass, but didn’t raise it. She looked uneasy. ‘You know, about the other night …’

  He shook his head. ‘No. Let’s not talk about it. It was my fault. I sent out mixed signals.’

  ‘But I …’ She paused, thought about it. ‘I came on a little strong, didn’t I?’

  He recalled the encounter in her apartment, how Tricia stuck her tongue in his ear and insisted that she wanted his cock inside of her. ‘No, not at all,’ he said. ‘You were a lady. Anyway, that’s all in the past. I’m sorry about how I acted.’

  ‘Me too.’ She lifted her tumbler. ‘To second chances,’ she said.

  They tapped glasses.

  She took a sip and licked her lips. She said: ‘I missed you at work today. I guess things aren’t going well, are they?’

  ‘No, they’re not.’

  She leaned over the table to confide a secret. ‘I think Jay is looking for another job.’

  ‘You think?’

  She nodded.

  He asked: ‘And what about you?’

  ‘Me?’ She looked surprised. ‘I’m staying. I mean, if you want me to.’

  ‘I do. I need you.’ Your body, anyway.

  ‘I know. You need a friend. I mean, first you lose your wife. And now your company is in trouble. Your investors want to leave. Your employee wants to leave. I know, I’m just a secretary—’