I hadn’t fully appreciated just how well Julia had done for herself. Around the time she married Keith, she started a software company with her old business school friends, worked her ass off, and then sold it several years later. Now she does—I don’t know what, I can’t tell from her status updates. I do know this: three children. Three! And Keith, of course. The screenwriter.
Wanted to hate his movies but I couldn’t. Wanted to hate him, but can’t. I’ve met Keith only once, at their wedding, but in the last few years I’ve read a lot of interviews with him—take from that what you like—rumpled manner, mile-a-minute talker, puts his foot in his mouth but in a relatable way, success hasn’t made him brittle or overcareful, something puppyish about him, makes you want to take care of him even though he’s a multimillionaire. Permanent child. Figured out how to get away with it.
I turn another steep corner.
Am I really going through with this?
Keep chugging uphill. This neighborhood is a maze. A ragged man in a hooded cloak stares at me from the corner across the street. San Francisco…
I bought new clothes this afternoon. Threw away the dead man’s clothes I wore on the plane. Only now I realize the fast-fashion outfit I bought is too young, too trendy. Trying too hard.
Does this road ever end? Twisting and turning, up and up.
It’s not the clothes. Nothing I could wear is going to hide the truth. Look at me. Lost the thread, life went wrong. For years I’ve been in a labyrinth and didn’t even realize it. Wandering the gray midwestern ice, flat streets, lonely years. Rotting inside.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
A different world here in San Francisco. You always knew this. Still, I wouldn’t leave Chicago. Numb misery. What was I numbing myself against? But you know. Asleep. Safer than the alternative.
Now I’m awake.
I felt sharply awake all day. Alive in the newness of a new place. That afternoon, killing time after buying clothes, I explored the neighborhood around my hotel, enjoying the sun, feeling free. Everyone around me young. Fashionable neighborhood. Nobody took notice of me. I was invisible. Because I was dead?
No, because I was old!
In a coffeeshop, I watched some dude trying to pick up a girl.
I’ll never play that game again. Ridiculous.
Wait, you know what’s really ridiculous? That I don’t try to pick up some girl. I’m dead, aren’t I? I can do anything!
But what am I, in fact, doing? Sitting in a cafe, eating a panini, drinking a five-dollar coffee.
Way to carpe the fucking diem!
Okay, well, what am I supposed to do? Run around whooping, clapping my hands? Kiss a stranger? “You there, boy! Fetch me the prize goose!” “What, the one as big as me, sir?” “Indeed, boy! Come back with it in less than five minutes and I’ll give you half-a-crown!” Merry Christmas!
I’m dead.
I’m dead but I’m not acting any differently. Should I have expected I would, though? After all, this scenario occasionally did present itself at Dare to Know. When I was obliged to look my client in the eye, clear my throat, and inform him that he had only a week of life left. Or a day.
Or an hour.
What do you think my client did then? What do you do when you’re told you’re practically already dead?
Go climb the Himalayas? Arrange an orgy?
You eat your shitty panini.
* * *
—
Where in Julia’s neighborhood am I?
My nauseating phone is lying on the passenger seat, as far from me as I can put it and still hear it. It’s patiently speaking to me, telling me directions, but I’m missing turns. I’m not used to San Francisco. It’s dark now and the street signs are obscured behind tree branches and leaves. Am I going to be late? I should bring something. Tacky to show up at Julia’s for dinner without, say, a bottle of wine. Or dessert. Ice cream? But that’d add at least ten minutes.
Do I really want to see Julia?
Why am I doing this?
The blue envelopes. Yeah, if she still has them. To learn whether the death I calculated for myself last night matches with the death she calculated years ago.
But something else is also waiting for me at Julia’s.
At a stoplight a ragged man stares at me from a dark clump of trees. When I turn to look, the man doesn’t stop staring.
Is it me he’s staring at?
A timid beep. There’s a woman in the car behind me. She looks irritated that I’m not moving. But she doesn’t like the idea of having to beep either. Not in this neighborhood.
I roll forward, leaving the ragged man behind.
* * *
—
We are near the end of our time, aren’t we? It’s ridiculous that I can’t find my way to Julia’s without my phone telling me exactly what to do. I used to have a sense of direction, I could read a map, I could get myself around. But as much as I hate this bossy thing on the seat next to me, how long would I last without it?
We all might find out sooner than we’d like. Astronomers tell us that perfectly ordinary eruptions from the sun could demolish Earth’s entire electronic network—apparently every few hundred years the sun randomly slaps the earth with a billion-ton cloud of magnetized plasma, the kind of space hurricane that will instantly short out electrical grids, blast satellites from the sky, spark catastrophic geomagnetic storms all over the world. Earth has already weathered such solar storms many times but nobody noticed because humanity never relied on electronic networks the way we do now. It’s like we’ve deliberately made ourselves flimsy. We’re precarious on purpose.
The fatal event doesn’t even have to be a solar storm. Maybe the Earth gets hit by an asteroid. Maybe some madman detonates an atomic bomb in New York City. Maybe another Black Plague spreads through our recklessly interconnected world. Then what? Mass hysteria, civilizational collapse, anarchy. We’ve made ourselves this fragile on purpose because we secretly want our destruction, because we want to participate in the turning of the cycles, we want to be the one who pushes the button that moves us into chaos. It happens at the end of every society. Druids in Britain sacrificing hundreds of victims in caves during the Roman invasion. Mass suicides in Germany and Japan at the end of World War II. Opioid epidemic in America. We know we’re on our way out, but we’ll kill ourselves before you can kill us, we’ll claim the dignity of choosing our death, we’ll integrate ourselves into the thanatons on purpose instead of you forcing us to integrate with the thanatons. At the end of any mythos you see these massive unforced errors, self-ownage, people tripping over their own dicks, punching themselves in the face.
We go down swinging at ourselves.
* * *
—
I turn down a random street. Now I’m off the route my phone has recommended. Because going to see Julia is a bad idea. It’s a bad idea. I shouldn’t go.
My phone scolds me: return to the route.
No.
I let myself be lost.
* * *
—
Julia married Keith about five years after I broke up with her, in a small town about twenty miles outside Bloomington.
It was supposed to be a backyard wedding at her friend’s house but it rained and all hundred or so guests had to crowd into a three-bedroom suburban colonial, eating off paper plates. It’s bitterly amusing to think this now, but back then I just figured, well, water finds its own level, right? Julia had reverted to her original status. Being part of Sapere Aude had made her relatively well-off but she had quit, and then paying her grandfather’s monstrous medical bills had sapped her savings. Now Julia was back where she started—lower middle class, with an unremarkable wedding to an unremarkable guy in an unremarkable city.
(Save your contempt, I know it’s snotty. Try telling your own life story, commit to reporting
honestly, see how likeable you come across.)
So I’d lost touch with Julia. But then I received her wedding invitation, out of the blue. No hard feelings, right? You’d think someone unsentimental like Julia would simply delete all former boyfriends, but Julia actually kept on jaunty good terms with many of them. Even when she and I were going out, we’d occasionally run into some random ex of hers at a party or at a bar, and I’d be baffled as Julia laughed with him and shared in-jokes. Julia’s bland chumminess with them depressed me.
Now I was in that special club.
Well, what did I expect? For Julia to weep over me for the rest of her life?
Two could play this game. I had just started dating Erin. She’d be my plus-one. Erin subtly signaled that she thought it was weird for me to take her to an ex–serious girlfriend’s wedding, but she didn’t raise any actual objection. Erin and I had only been going out for a few months anyway.
When I met Erin she was a chipper elementary school principal. The principal of my own elementary school had been a bloodless goblin who never left his office, but Erin ran her school with passion, she was young, full of energy and ideas. The students adored her. I’d visit her at work and they’d throng her in the bright, art-covered hallways. They had affection for her. Erin had a pert spiritedness, she laughed easily, everyone loved her, and for some reason she thought I was worthwhile.
That’s why I married Erin: not because I was crazy about her, but because she seemed to have genuine affection for me. For five years I had zipped through a string of girlfriends, nothing had clicked, and now I was ready to settle down, or I guess settle. With Erin I figured, look, for whatever reason she thinks I’m a catch, so all I have to do is not fuck it up! That should be easy!
Well, I couldn’t keep up the act forever. It didn’t collapse all at once, but who can live up to someone else’s ideal? Erin eventually saw through me. By the time the boys were toddlers she had lost all illusions. I was just an exasperating husband who had to be managed, humored, tolerated.
I couldn’t take it. And so unconsciously—okay, somewhat consciously—I drained the joy out of her. Erin’s unselfish energy, her bighearted granting of the benefit of the doubt to the universe, her bright trusting nature—I turned all her good qualities against her and punished her for having them.
But back at the time of Julia’s wedding, the illusion was intact. I was still a catch. And the fact remains that, despite the low-rent nature of the affair, despite the thunderstorm that drove us all inside, or maybe because of all that, it was one of the more enjoyable weddings I’d been to.
Until the end.
* * *
—
Because of the rain, nearly every room of the house was opened up to guests. Erin and I were jostling next to somebody’s uncle, drinking boxed wine out of plastic cups in the laundry room; we were standing and eating wedding cake in the family room while a bunch of kids whined about not being allowed to play their Dreamcast. (“Shhh, I’ve already told you, some of our guests get sick around computers.” “God, Mom, it’s just Sonic, what kinda pussies are these people?”)
As the rain pounded down, the ceremony itself was hastily adapted for the basement. I was crowded out—I could barely see Julia and Keith’s exchange of vows. After it was over, that unfinished downstairs space was cleared out to make an impromptu dance floor. The basement also had a sliding glass door that opened onto a sunken backyard patio, so there was enough air circulation that it wouldn’t get too disgustingly hot down there.
Keith was one of those guys who had a hundred male friends who looked just like him, lumpy goofballs who were part-time improv comedians or in terrible bands. People like this can be fine, but a cramped house full of them is the worst. They were all bellowing at each other, doing “bits,” getting too drunk and sweatily jumping on each other’s backs. Erin and I exchanged looks; these dudes were overgrown versions of her fifth graders.
I was embarrassed. Erin was amused.
Julia had relaxed her standards, apparently. I saw her laughing with Keith and his goober friends, genuine laughs. I couldn’t imagine what undergraduate-era Julia would say about this sloppy wedding. Julia’s severe taste, which I had found so attractive back then, which I had voluntarily accepted as a kind of challenge to up my game, was no longer operative. Had she outgrown her laser-sharp disdain? The more likely explanation: dismissing half the world for finicky reasons was an extravagance Julia could no longer afford. So go ahead, settle for a good-hearted oaf like Keith.
But Jesus, him?
Back then Keith and his clown friends were always shooting comedy videos and posting them online, I guess hoping to get famous. I couldn’t bring myself to watch them, and not only because computers made me ill. The comedy I did glimpse was pure cringe, shoddy production values, bad acting—“Yeah, but that’s the joke!” I’m sure they would’ve explained to me, “It’s bad on purpose!” I think one of his friends was writing a young adult novel and another was trying to get what I guess was an early version of a podcast off the ground. I recognized the social contours of a scene here, similar to when all my friends were starting bands in the nineties, or even the early days of Sapere Aude. But this crew of jokers depressed me.
Erin and I were standing in the hallway to the door that led into the garage. “Well, what do you think?”
“I like her friends,” she said. “This whole party makes me feel like I’m in college again.”
“Yeah, except these dudes are practically thirty.”
“Be nice,” said Erin, but I could tell she was amused that I wasn’t impressed.
Thunder boomed outside. The rain was really coming down. The backyard had been elaborately decorated for the outdoor wedding but now it was all soaked and ruined. Nobody seemed to care. There were a lot of people laughing, music blared from downstairs, a group of children came tearing past.
“Let’s go downstairs and dance,” said Erin.
“Seriously? There’s no room.”
“What else are we supposed to do? Come on, it’ll be fun.”
Erin and I danced to a few songs in the basement, and then a few more. I liked dancing with Erin okay, she moved in a competent, asexual way that made dancing a kind of wholesome calisthenic, a style befitting her job as a K–8 principal, perhaps embodying how she wished her seventh graders would behave at dances (instead of their desperate, moist grinding that the teachers were sometimes too embarrassed to break up). But the basement started to fill with comedians; somebody started a conga line, oh boy. The rain petered out, so Erin and I escaped the basement onto the patio.
The wet cool evening air was refreshing. I barely had a chance to speak to Julia that night, but that’s fair, I knew how weddings worked. The bride had a lot of other people to attend to. Who was I to her anymore, anyway?
She did look beautiful.
Don’t. Those thoughts—don’t.
Almost nobody from what was left of Julia’s family had come. None of her Sapere Aude friends was there except for me. No Hutchinson, no Ziegler, no Kulkarni…had Julia even invited them? Probably not. Keith more than made up for it, though, he seemed to have endless troops of family and friends. What would the Sapere Aude crowd have thought of these dorks yes-anding each other’s dick jokes? Ziegler would feel right at home, he’d contribute to the yuks. Hutchinson would smile indulgently and get quiet, his eye aggressively roving as he got drunker and drunker. And Kulkarni, the preppy from Connecticut, would find the whole scene unbearable, but he’d never say it. He’d pass over it in tasteful silence, probably make a discreet early exit.
Erin had gone off to get us drinks. I spotted Julia coming out to the patio. I caught her eye. She smiled at me and raised a finger as if to say, I know I owe you some time but let me deal with this other stuff first. I watched Julia move from group to group, her white dress incandescent in the backyard floodlight. I had thought I
knew Julia but tonight I saw sides of her I’d never seen before, sides that didn’t read as Julia to me. She flitted fondly around Keith’s friends, mother-henning these chunky dweebs, a Wendy looking after unappetizing lost boys. It was absolutely possible, it was even likely, that many of these grown men played beer pong, referred to marijuana and each other with hilarious nicknames, and had elaborate opinions about superhero movies. And yet Julia seemed happy with them. She seemed to enjoy indulging them. That did not compute.
Erin came back with drinks for both of us. “Look at this, vodka gimlets!”
“They’re making cocktails now?”
“No, but the bartender’s gone, so I helped myself.”
“I think the bartender is just one of Keith’s friends.”
“That’s what I figured…there wasn’t much of anything left but I found some Rose’s and some vodka in the freezer. How do you like me now?”
“I do like you very much.”
“Yeah you do.”
We clinked real cocktail glasses that Erin had liberated from a dining room cabinet. We found ourselves standing next to a hangdog guy in his early twenties smoking a joint, one of the few guys who didn’t seem to be constantly “on,” although apparently he did think that dressing up like a seventies game show host for a wedding would be clever.
Erin, playfully social, introduced us to him. His name was Gregory and he had a wary look. Even after he explained to us what his relationship with Julia and Keith was, I still didn’t understand it; there was something vague and self-negating about Gregory’s manner of speech that made it hard to follow his meaning.
“Why don’t you tell us about the cast of characters here?” said Erin. “Where do you fit in?”
“Cast of characters…” said Gregory, trailing off. “I guess I know most everyone.”
“Who’s that guy over there?” I said.
“Nate? Oh, he’s only, like, the best scribbleboard player I’ve ever heard.”
Dare to Know Page 18