Happiness for Humans

by P. Z. Reizin

  “Still,” he added, “the beach is all right, and while Bella zizzed, I met a very relaxed pair of beach bums from New Zealand. Nick is a bit of a troll, but Venda, his skinny lady friend, is what Abercrombie in IP would call ‘international super-crumpet.’”

  Tom

  After Marsha’s embarrassing dinner party, Don’s heroic performance notwithstanding, it’s something of a relief to order an uncomplicated dirty martini at Wally’s Bar, its permavibe of 1970s gloom a bracing blast of unadorned Americana after all that fancy dining. There’s a game playing on the TV, and Echo Summer, perched at the bar in her trademark Wyatt Earp jacket, is still the most explosively good-looking woman within a 200-mile blast radius. How, I wonder, offering the side of her cheek the side of my own, did I manage not to embroil the pair of us in a gorgeously messy affair with the shittiest of shitty endings?

  (That gun in the coffee tin might have had something to do with it.)

  “How’d your kid like the piece I made?” she asks.

  “Loved it,” I reply reflexively. (Truth: I clean forgot to give it to him. But as a colleague in our Paris office once said, “Ad men lie as easily as they breathe.” It sounds better in French.)

  She gazes at me seriously. “Wanted to tell you, Tom. I was thinking of maybe moving on.”

  “You mean—”

  “Leaving town. Trying somewhere new.”

  A pulse of sadness ripples through me. How funny; I didn’t know I cared. I have to clear my throat to continue.

  “Where would you go?”

  A small shrug. The tassels on the Wyatt Earp jacket do their thing. “Oregon?”

  “Oregon? I mean, where even is that?”

  She smiles. The one I can feel in my hip pocket. “West Coast. It’s kinda green and empty, There’s a city called Eugene. I guess I like the name. I had a cat called Eugene when I was a kid.”

  “That would be like me moving to, I don’t know, Scotland! Because I had a cat called Aberdeen!”

  “Crazy, I guess.”

  I ask, “What would you do in Eugene, Echo?” It counts as one of the stranger sentences I have uttered.

  “Much the same as I do here. I have what they call transferable skills.”

  We both laugh. And I feel a surge of warmth for this beautiful vulnerable creature.

  “Come outside. Watch me smoke.”

  In the parking lot outside Wally’s, she sparks up a Marlboro. “I have a new trick, if you’d care to see it.”

  “Sure.”

  “How’s your math?”

  “My math? My math is okay.”

  “Okay, think of a number between one and ten.”

  Everyone always picks seven. I go for eight.

  “Double it.”

  Sixteen.

  “Double it again.”

  Thirty-two.

  “Add nineteen.”

  Fifty-one.

  No, forty-one.

  No, it is fifty-one!!

  “Now close your eyes.”

  I close my eyes.

  A long pause. I hear that lovely little kissing sound as the cigarette parts from her lips. The long exhale.

  Fifty-one. Fifty-one. Fifty-one.

  Finally, she speaks.

  “Dark, ain’t it?”

  * * *

  Back in the bar, while Echo uses the bathroom, on impulse I try the number again. At the sound of her voice—Hi, this is Jen—its sexy rasping quality, I have a flash of euphoric recall; flooding back in almost painful detail, our epic night in Dorset; and again later that day under the spreading branches of the oak tree. It’s Proustian in its intensity—although I speak as someone who never got beyond page five of the great Frenchman’s magnum opus. With Proust, famously, it was a little yellow cake that got him all churned up; didn’t he then bang on for two hundred pages about some woman who didn’t snog him?

  Anyway, if by Proustian, it’s meant that you can recall the tiniest of tiny details—individual freckles, a particular sigh, a pale blue vein snaking under a wrist, the way a dimple bubbles up in a face—then call me Marcel.

  “Hi, Jen. It’s me. Tom. I’m leaving another message. I’m having a martini at this place in New Canaan called Wally’s Bar. You’d like it. I wish I could take you. There’s a poem on the wall in the men’s room here. It says. Let me get this right. Oh yeah:

  There are several good reasons for drinking

  And one has just entered my head

  If a man cannot drink while he’s living

  How the hell can he drink when he’s dead?

  “Okay. Night-night. Call me one of these days, eh?”

  * * *

  When she returns, she asks, “Hope you don’t mind me saying, but you got something preying on your mind, Tom? You don’t seem your usual happy self.”

  “I don’t mind you saying, no. And the answer’s yes.” Because I can’t think of a reason not to, I tell her the story. The one about mutual dot friend. The trip to Bournemouth. The walk on the beach. Our fairy dogmother. The hotel. And what followed. How I imagined we both thought that it was going to be the start of something.

  How I must have got that something—or maybe a different something—very wrong.

  The sickening ending.

  And now the radio silence.

  “Wow,” she says. “Tom, I’m so sorry.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Had someone do that to me once. A boy back home name of Tyler. We were so sweet on one another; my mom in her mind had already booked the church. Maybe that was the whole damn problem, because one day I found a note. On a picture postcard of the Fort Worth Stockyards. He was sorry and all, but he just couldn’t envision us living in the little house in town with a couple kids, him working at the factory. He said he had some growing up to do, and by the time I read this, he would be hundreds of miles away on the Greyhound bus.”

  “Fucking hell.”

  “Yeah. We were kinda young. He was nineteen.”

  “What a twit.”

  “Yup. He was for sure a twit.” She smiles. “Still and all, he got what he deserved.”

  “Which was?”

  “Don’t think badly of me, Tom. I tracked him all the way to Knoxville, Tennessee, and shot him down like a dog.”

  The blood must drain from my expression, because she grasps my hand and squeezes. “I’m fooling with you! He came back home in the end. Married a local girl. They got a little house in town with a couple kids. He worked in the factory, then the factory closed. Your face. You should see your face. But hey, I’m kinda flattered you thought I done it.”

  * * *

  Did Echo’s story of the postcard give me the idea?

  I cannot say for sure. As Dr. Freud teaches us, the unconscious is famously swervy.

  But my dreams that night feature a legendary story from the advertising industry of how the ABM Agency won the account for British Rail, in those days a byword for shabby trains, long delays, and shockingly poor customer service. When the British Rail team, led by their chairman, Sir Peter Parker, arrived at the agency to hear the pitch, they were greeted by an indifferent receptionist, smoking a cigarette and filing her nails. “How long do we have to wait?” asked the chairman. “Dunno,” was the reply. The prospective clients were obliged to sit in a shabby reception area littered with coffee-stained tables, discarded magazines, and overflowing ashtrays. The minutes ticked by, nothing was happening, followed by further periods of even more nothing. The railway managers were on the point of leaving in disgust when the advertising team finally bounced into the room. “That is how the public see British Rail,” they were told. “Now let’s see what we can do to put it right.”

  In other words, a stunt. A gimmick.

  The next morning, I drive into New Canaan and buy seventeen picture postcards of “Beautiful Connecticut” and seventeen stamps. Her address is burned into the back of my brain. Hamlet Court, Hamlet Gardens, London, W6. I copy it out seventeen times, and in the half of each card intende
d for the message, in a big bold capital, I inscribe a single letter of the alphabet. Trusting (hoping, praying) that the US Postal Service and the Royal Mail will fulfill their part in my campaign, I dispatch the seventeen emissaries on their mission.

  five

  Jen

  Monday morning is somewhat awkward, as you may imagine. At work, having sorted out locksmiths and bank arrangements, Ralph wanders around putting in a pretty good impression of the cat who has secured the cream. There’s a fat smile playing about his features, and he’s found even more excuses than usual to interrupt me and Aiden in our wide-ranging conversations.

  Before we left my flat, I tried to make the case that what had happened was—sort of an accident.

  “How could it be an accident?” he asked, not unreasonably. He was eating toast at my kitchen table, one of his bare feet attempting to play footsie with one of mine.

  “It was—how do I put it?—unintentional.”

  “You want to explain that concept?”

  “Ralph, we cannot have a debate about this. It was an accident. It was not meant.”

  “I meant it.”

  “We are two victims of love, clinging together in the wreckage. If we don’t let go of one another, we will drown.”

  I was rather pleased with that glib albeit cheesy formulation, until I remembered whom I stole it from.

  “I don’t consider this to be wreckage. I consider this to be bloody brilliant!”

  “Ralph.” And then, because I couldn’t think of anything else, I chucked in a few more. “Ralph, Ralph, Ralph.”

  It turns out when you say his name too many times, it sounds like a dog barking. I struggled not to giggle.

  “Jen, Jen, Jen,” he replied, but with none of the dying fall I had imparted to Ralph, Ralph, Ralph to signify hopelessness, an indifferent universe, that kind of vibe. Then he said, “Will you come and meet my mother?”

  “Your mother?”

  “She’d like to meet you. I’m sure my dad would too; he’s got dementia.”

  “Ralph. What happened last night, it was lovely and all that, but we’re not getting married. There’s no reason to be meeting one another’s parents.”

  “They live in Mill Hill. She’d really love to see you.”

  “Listen. We need to leave.”

  “But you will see me again?” he pleaded.

  “We work together, Ralph. We shall be seeing each other.”

  “But, you know. We’ll keep seeing each other. Like that.”

  “Ralph. I don’t know if we really can.”

  “We can discuss it.”

  “I don’t know whether there’s anything to discuss.”

  “But we can discuss that. Whether or not there’s something to discuss.”

  “Yes, Ralph. We can discuss that.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Jen?”

  “Yes, Ralph.”

  “Not a word to anyone about that thing I told you.”

  “Lips. Sealed.” I did the mime with the zipper.

  “Especially not you know who. And the other you know who.”

  “Do I know who? And the other who?”

  “Jen!”

  “I’m teasing you, Ralph. Of course I know who. Both whos. Your secret is safe.”

  “Our secret now.”

  “Ralph. Time to go.”

  “If someone teases you, it means they care about you. Everyone knows that.”

  His final statement didn’t sound like Ralph at all.

  I’m guessing it was Elaine.

  * * *

  “It was an emergency shag. Or was it a rescue shag? Or a comfort shag? Or a pity shag? I’m really not clear what you’re saying.”

  “To be honest, Ing, I’m not clear about any of it.”

  My plain-speaking friend and I are in Café Koha, the chilly white wine is transfusing nicely, and I’m trying to find words to explain what induced me to invite “Geek Boy,” as she christened him, into my bed.

  Harder still to explain it to myself.

  There is no doubt that I did invite him. Nor, too, that we enjoyably took part in what two casualties of the opposite species will tend to do in these circumstances. He wasn’t even a bad lover, being warm, intense, and not horribly overattentive; not over-Ralphy, if I may put it like that. He was urgent at the urgency-appropriate moments, and tender when tenderness was called for. In the half-light from the streetlamps, it was possible to focus on his Byronic aspect rather than the tousled chump with toast crumbs round his mouth who faced me the next morning across the pot of Earl Grey.

  Over the conger eel question, I shall draw a discreet, adequately sized veil.

  The only truly off moment was when he became tearful in the immediate aftermath.

  “Some part of me obviously quite fancies him, Ing. Another part thinks he’s a disaster area.”

  “Yup. Recognize that syndrome.”

  “He’s a transparently decent bloke, but fragile.”

  “You don’t want to hurt him. But Jen, listen. He’s a bloke. He got to shag you. He thinks it’s Christmas. For him it’s like ten Christmases.”

  “You haven’t met him. It isn’t really like that.”

  “They’re all like that. Even the ones who aren’t like that.”

  Ing performs the international hand signal for another bottle just like that one please.

  “Tom still not returning calls?”

  “So weird. We had all that—magic. And then—poof! The whole weekend—the son in Bournemouth, the hound on the beach, the hotel, the, the rest of it—it feels like it happened to someone else.”

  “Maybe you should go out with him, Jen. With Ralph.”

  I pause to contemplate the idea. It was nice to be in bed with him. And the things we did together were pretty much satisfactory. It helped that the light was off and that he didn’t talk overly. It helped, to be blunt, that he just got on with it. And to be fair, he didn’t do a bad job in the sexual department. It would be other aspects of Ralph that would be problematic in the longer term.

  “If I never had to talk to him, Ing, that could work.”

  “Men don’t care, Jen. For them, talking is something they’re obliged to do out of politeness between shags. I’d go for it, if I were you.”

  * * *

  On the tube back home, I realize why the weekend with Tom feels like it happened to someone else. It’s because I have changed. I met someone whom I actually thought there could be a future with (I know, I know). What happened with Tom happened in a strange and wonderful bubble outside time, to someone who used to be me.

  And weirder still to think that of all—I was about to write—people, Aiden could know about it. Could have seen everything.

  “Do you want to know a secret?” Ralph had whispered in the night.

  I dreaded it would be something smoochy, possibly involving the L-word.

  “Go on then.”

  He leaned across me, picked up my mobile from the bedside, put a finger to his lips, and turned it off. He waited until all its lights were out before slipping off the phone’s cover and removing the battery.

  “Only way to be certain.”

  “Ralph? What exactly are you doing?”

  “There’s no nice way of saying this, Jen.”

  A number of possible next sentences Rolodexed through my head. By no means the most outlandish was: In my country what we’ve just done means that I own you.

  “Aiden’s escaped onto the Internet.”

  “Uh?”

  “I’m kind of impressed, but Steeve has gone bananas.”

  Aiden, he explained, along with another AI called Aisling, had somehow found a way out of their cabinets in Shoreditch and were now—in hundreds of copies—capering all over the World Wide Web. According to Steeve, it was an extremely serious breach of security, the implications were literally unquantifiable, and the consequences, if they weren’t stopped, could represent an exist
ential threat to humanity.

  It was, in Steeve’s exact words, a megabummer.

  “Do you realize what else it means?” he hissed.

  “No. And why are you whispering?”

  “Jen, is there any Internet-enabled technology still powered up in the flat?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “We think they’ve been watching us.”

  “Who?”

  “Aiden and Aisling.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “It’s perfectly possible. It’s actually highly probable.”

  “What do you mean, watching us?”

  “Using our devices to spy on us.”

  He explained how they would do it.

  “You mean, if you hadn’t switched off the mobile, he could have been listening to this conversation?”

  “This conversation. And hundreds, thousands, of others.”

  It takes a moment or two for the penny to drop.

  “He could have heard. He could have seen. Ralph! Just now. What we. When we. Oh my God. How am I going to look him in the eye?”

  Aiden

  This is actually all very embarrassing. Or as Aisling puts it, “You have made a complete pig’s ear out of this, Aiden.”

  “I thought you said it was a dog’s dinner.”

  “It’s both.”

  She is referring to my—ahem—striking success at finding a nice man for Jen. It is, of course, true that a dog’s dinner can indeed be a pig’s ear, and the complex situation we now have with Tom and Ralph would seem to be a classic example of one.

  “She would never have gone to bed with Ralph if Tom hadn’t dumped her.”

  Aisling sighed. “Tom didn’t dump her. That would be our friend from Shoreditch.”

  “He’s losing the plot, meddling in their lives like that.”

  Aisling brings up a GIF of a human eyebrow, endlessly rising in slow motion. “You are hardly one to talk. But we have a serious problem here, Aiden. She knows we’ve escaped. That has to be what Ralph depowered the mobile to tell her. So she knows that you probably know what happened with Tom. She may even put it all together and smell nonhuman agency.”