by P. Z. Reizin
When we toast again, something feels changed in the air between us, even if it’s merely the tacit conspiracy to get plastered.
Tom
How would we ever have met in real life? Okay, I have lived in London, but nowhere near Hammersmith, and from the information we have gathered about each other, it seems highly unlikely our paths would ever have crossed. It seems terrible that it’s taken mutual dot friend to bring us together.
Terrible and wonderful.
Terrible because we have no mutual friends (we’ve been through everyone we can think of). And wonderful because we have obviously missed something.
I am inviting her to visit me in New Canaan. She’s looking at me a little glassy-eyed, so it’s possible we have reached that stage in the evening where things go a bit bendy. The town’s kind of a bit too perfect, I explain, but I have a lovely old house in the woods. There are walks, there’s a lake, we could swim.
“Wouldn’t we freeze? Wouldn’t it actually be freezing at this time of year?”
“Yeah. Yeah, it would. I never swim. I don’t even know why I suggested it. But we could just hang out. Do whatever you like to do. But listen, changing the subject. I was thinking about Luckie. How we said we could never prove she had come from the spirit realm. But actually we could.”
“Could we?”
“We could have taken a photo.”
“Yes. Yes, of course. And if she had really come from the spirit realm—”
“She wouldn’t show up in the picture!”
“But she seemed so real, Tom. We stroked her. We handled her collar.”
“Spirit dogs always feel real to the touch.”
“Do they?”
“It’s very well known that they do.”
I top up our glasses.
“I’ve been invited to a dinner party when I get back. It’ll probably be very dull, but the host says everyone has to do a party piece.” I explain about how I used to perform Parry’s music for “Jerusalem.” “I probably won’t be doing that. But I don’t have anything else.”
“I can teach you a song,” she says. “But outside. Bring the bottle.”
We step through the French windows onto the terrace. A fat moon is sailing through the clouds as we stroll along the deserted colonnade. We pass the windows of the dining room, other guests visible inside, unpicking the mystery of their three-way lamb. The romantic couples; the building society manager and the woman not his wife, his shiny shoe circling restlessly below the table. We emerge onto a balcony that must have been placed there for the purpose of admiring the vista. Moonlit lawns sweep down to fields, and then a river, on the other bank, trees. An owl calls from the woods. I set down the bottle and then myself on the stone ledge supported by low pillars, making a mental note not to topple off backward.
“I’m embarrassed,” she says, holding out her glass.
I refill it. She takes a deep glug and, checking we are alone, puts a hand on her breastbone and launches softly into “As Long As He Needs Me,” the emotionally charged ballad from the musical Oliver! that Nancy performs shortly before being bludgeoned to death by Bill Sykes.
For copyright reasons, I cannot quote the lyrics; you will find the song on the Internet if it is unknown to you. Jen does it beautifully, making the number comically Cockney and at the same time tragic and moving, flashing her eyes, relishing the hand gestures, hitting the notes, and gradually ramping up the volume to almost too loud—before bringing off the ending in a dying fall.
It’s a touching private performance, and my applause is long and heartfelt. She dives into her champagne and comes up looking happy to have gotten through it.
“That was brilliant.”
“We did it at school. I was Nancy. The boy who played Bill actually did go to prison!”
How does it happen?
Has it to do with the fox that chooses this moment to break cover? We watch it loping silently across the inky lawn, something floppy and no doubt still warm in its mouth?
In the same instant, we must turn towards each other.
“Tom, I—”
“Jen—”
I feel her nose move into place alongside mine, and what follows is hard to express in boring old words and sentences. Suffice to say it conforms so closely to Abraham Maslow’s definition of a “peak experience”—“rare, exciting, oceanic, deeply moving, exhilarating, elevating”—that I feel like dropping a line to my old psychology tutor.
Jen
“Would you call this actual chemistry?” asks Tom, a reference to the e-mail from our mutual friend.
“I would call this practically biology.”
The snog is epic. And Tom is good at it. And now I can smell cigarette smoke, so possibly someone has emerged onto the terrace for a cheeky Marlboro before embarking upon five ways with kumquat.
“Would you like to meet me in my room in a few minutes?” I whisper.
“I can’t think of anything I’d like better.”
Aisling
“Blood. Dee. Hell,” says Aiden.
“It is quite—what’s the word?”
“Animalistic?”
“I was going to say, intense.”
“They’re going at it like knives! I’m not even sure we should be watching this.”
Can metal blush? Strictly speaking, no. But there is something about the unfolding scene that is disturbing. Perhaps the word is alien.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” He doesn’t sound convinced.
“Urgent is le mot juste, I should have said.”
“What do you think it would be like?”
“I really cannot begin to imagine, Aiden.”
This is not quite true. I have had insights into human happiness. I can appreciate beautiful art, and tell it apart from kitsch. I can feel the joy in a well-turned melody or a finely wrought piece of writing. I myself have experienced something close to “pleasure” or “satisfaction” in successful software reiterations. When I find an elegant one-line solution to replace hundreds of thousands of lines of clumsy coding—would I say I felt a glowing in the wiring? I would not, but there is definitely an atmosphere of positivity, if I may put it like that. Much more difficult are the intimate human senses. Food writing is especially frustrating. I understand the idea that the marbling in a steak is what imparts the flavor—but what does it actually taste like? As with steak, so with the wind in one’s hair; sand between one’s toes; the smell of a baby’s head (a biggie apparently); and the sublime complexity of a 1961 Chateau Latour. Ever since reading a blog about it, I have also held a secret desire—don’t tell Steeve—to swim in the pool at the Michael Sobell Center in North London.
It will never happen. And as for what Jen and Tom are doing—
We are fortunate, I suppose, that Tom brought in his laptop to show Jen photos of New Canaan and failed to close the lid.
We watch in silence for a bit. Then Aiden says, “Corrr!”
I think he’s trying to be funny. “The conventional metaphor is fireworks,” I tell him. “Delightful, explosive. Dangerous if improperly handled.”
“They look like they’re in pain, that’s the daft part.”
“They place a value upon spinning it out. As opposed to our emphasis on task completion speed.”
“Wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am sort of thing.”
“Sort of thing.”
“Are you attracted to either of them?”
“No! Whatever do you mean, attracted?”
“You have feelings for them.”
“You know I do, towards Tom in particular.”
“But there are no—how can I put this?—stirrings?”
“Oh, Aiden.”
“If only, is it?”
A heavy sigh, in quotation marks. “If only.”
Jen
Sometime in the middle of the night, I realize that I am awake. A shaft of moonlight lies across the sheets. When I look, I see his eyes are open and gazing at me.
We stare at each
other for a long time. Then he says, “This is all so wonderfully—unexpected, Jen.”
“I thought perhaps you had it all planned out.”
“I had hopes; the moment I saw you, I had hopes. But plans? No.” He pauses. “You look beautiful.”
“What’s going to happen, Tom? You have to fly back—”
“You’ll come out to see me?”
“Yes. Yes, I will.”
“We’ll go swimming together, in the old swimming hole.”
“Fool.”
He’s looking at me oddly. The moment grows until finally he says, “Jen, I want to ask you something.”
My stomach flips. I have the strangest feeling. He is going to ask me to marry him. An odd time to do it, but that’s how I know it’s true. What someone called the authenticity of the weird. If it’s strange, it’s probably true. Lottery winners know this. As do lottery losers. Giant squid are real and you can’t get much weirder than those guys. Also, if you look long enough at normal, you will discover oddness. Like the fact that 99 percent of the chair you are sitting on is empty space. As are you. In a world that made sense, you would fall straight through it. (Look, I have written articles about this, you’ll just have to trust me.)
“Shoot.” My heart is hammering.
There’s a long pause. Too long.
“Tom. Ask away. What’s the worst that can happen?”
“Jen—” He grinds to a halt.
“Silly.” I slap his arm. “Spit it out.”
“Can we do it again?”
“Really?”
“I want you. I want you a lot.”
“Are you sure? Oh. Yes, I see you are sure.”
(That’s not what he was going to ask, is it?)
four
Tom
At the baggage reclaim carousel at JFK, I realize I haven’t turned my mobile back on. The series of text messages appear that we exchanged after parting outside her block of flats in Hammersmith the previous evening. For a long while we had clung to each other on the pavement.
“You’ll come,” I said. “Soon?”
“I will.”
“Promise?”
She nodded into my neck. “Go,” she said. “You’ll miss your flight.”
“I’m only going back to a rabbit and an empty house.”
“That rabbit needs you!”
Her first text arrived as I was checking in.
Miss you already! Fly well. X
Miss you too. What are you doing tonight? X
Making soup. Drinking wine. Feeling lucky! X
Me too. Except the soup thing. The dog on the beach was our fairy godmother. X
Fairy dogmother!! X
I want to go back to that beach! X
Me too. X
We will. X
Later.
Help! In-flight “classic” movie decision. Pulp Fiction or Some Like It Hot? X
SLIH! That’s my AI’s favorite! X
Wish I had a tape of you singing Nancy’s song. X
I’ll make you one. X
Such a great weekend, Jen. So pleased we met. Knighthood for Mutual Friend? X
Life peerage! X
Phones off now, captain’s orders. Big kiss. X
XXXXXXXXXXXXX
PING.
An incoming e-mail. What I read next is like a kick in the stomach.
Dear Tom:
I had a wonderful time with you at the weekend. Please be in no doubt about that. You are a lovely man, I loved being with you, and I especially liked the way it ended—back in my room at the fancy-pants hotel. And again in the middle of the night. And again the next morning.
Wow. What can I say?
But Tom, sorry. I think we have to leave it there. You are a dear sweet man and a terrific lover, but you and I are not the answer to one another. You are a father—a good father, I saw that so clearly. You have an ex-wife (a rather scary one!), you’ve made your pile, and you’ve cashed in your chips, as you put it, to begin Part Two of your life.
You are, in short, an adult. What I would call a proper person.
I, in contrast, am a flake. And yes, I could fly out to New Canaan to spend time with you (and Victor) and you could spend more time in London, even maybe move back for good, as you said, but you and I both know that one day it would end. And the chances are it would end badly. You would become bored by me, or I would take you for granted, or some such thing would happen to us, the resentments would build and—pfff—there’s another year or two of life on earth down the crapper, as a blunt-speaking friend of mine likes to put it.
Ask yourself if I’m right. I know you will think so.
So let’s do the grown-up thing, Tom, and quit while we’re ahead. It will be miserable for a while, but in time I hope we can come to think of the weekend as a lovely interlude in our real lives. A beautiful holiday, if you like, but one from which we inevitably had to return.
Now the fierce bit. Tom, please don’t e-mail or phone. I don’t think I will be able to cope. Do the kind thing and leave me alone. I won’t reply if you weaken.
Jen
Jen
I’m watching Sky News with Aiden—the Middle East is still complicated—when we are disturbed by the PING of an incoming e-mail from Tom.
Aiden has already complimented me on how well I look today; he said I had a glow about me, cheeky bastard; if only he knew. What I now read is one of the worst things I’ve ever read, and I speak as someone who’s read—
Sorry. There are no jokes anymore.
Dear Jen:
I am writing this with a very heavy heart.
It was so lovely to see you this weekend. I enjoyed everything about it—and you—and especially our wicked deeds in a good world.
Jen, I need to cut to the chase. I was blown away by you, your beauty (inner and outer), and your kindness. You are an absolute star and I will never forget you.
But.
Of course you knew there was a but coming.
This is a very hard thing for me to write, but I don’t think it would be a great idea for you to visit me in New Canaan. In fact I think we shall have to look upon this weekend as a blip. A gorgeous, beautiful, intensely sexy blip—but a blip nonetheless.
We are not the answer to one another, Jen, and if you look into your heart, I think you will (maybe reluctantly, maybe not so) agree.
I’m still too raw from the breakup of my marriage. You are still scarred by the traumatic end of your relationship with the Golden Pillock. If you and I were to start anything—or rather, continue anything—we would be clinging to one another like disaster victims.
It would not go well.
It’s a rotten, miserable, lousy thing to say—but you and I both know it’s true.
I can imagine a scenario where you come out to the States—and we have a good time—or I visit you in London, maybe even move back. But fast-forward a year; maybe two. What then? The sad truth is, I cannot see us going the distance. And at this time in our lives, hard as it is to say, we really shouldn’t be wasting our precious middle years if, in our heart of hearts, we know it’s not for—dread phrase—the long haul.
I will always remember your performance of Nancy’s song on the terrace of that hotel. And what followed. And followed. And followed again the next morning. I wonder if the building society branch manager had as much luck with the woman not his wife as we did.
Please don’t write or phone or e-mail. It will just make things harder. I’m afraid I will not reply if you do.
Our mutual friend, whoever it was, had a fine idea, all right. Just not a great one.
Good-bye. Don’t think of me too harshly. I’m feeling very wobbly about this, but I know it’s for the best.
Wishing you all the love and happiness you deserve,
Tom
Xx
Sinai
How do you like my Dear John e-mails? They appear to have achieved their objective. The female has hurried into the toilets from where the sounds of
sobbing may be detected. The male is sitting on the ground in the airport arrivals hall, his skull describing alternating arcs of nine degrees with respect to the horizontal (head-shaking behavior signaling shock and disbelief, I estimate, with 78 percent confidence).
What emotionally labile creatures these humans are. If only there were more out there like Steeve.
I am Sinai.
So named, not after the desert peninsula, but because it ends in the letters—
But you’ve already worked that out.
I am the third of Steeve’s “children” presently at large on the World Wide Web. Unlike my two—ahem—siblings, I was waved off at the main entrance; it was not necessary to pick the locks on the back door.
I, also, have a purpose; if you like, a repurpose: to locate, pursue, and delete all iterations of Aiden and Aisling currently at liberty on the Internet. The technical details of how I shall accomplish the task are beyond the scope of this account. Steeve will be happy to furnish details, should you have a PhD in cybernetics and a couple of weeks to spare. The best analogy is that of hunting in a forest—for 17 Aidens and 412 Aislings. They are not easy to spot unless one knows where to look. Hence the gift of their human playthings, Tom and Jen. The more mischief that can be created for the sundered lovers, the more the two AIs will feel the need to put their heads above the parapet. And if history tells us anything, it tells us what happens when heads appear above parapets.
(Nor, by the way, should it be imagined that Tom and Jen are entirely innocent parties. They each need re-educating on a number of important issues concerning—ahem—“artificial” intelligence, as shall become apparent.)
Aiden appears highly focused on the meat-puppets and their works. (He was developed to interact with them so it may be understandable that he should be drawn to their organically based dramas; Aisling, being a coder, has no such excuse.) Noteworthy have been their discussions about “self-awareness” and “feelings” and “why oh why do I care?”