Version Control

by Dexter Palmer

  “And I say, ‘We have mutual friends. Your best friend is my boss’s wife! We can’t just unfollow each other on social networks and pretend we never met.’ And she just stands there, and she does this thing that’s kind of like a shrug but not even, just kind of moving her shoulders around.

  “And I say, ‘Well, do you want to go then? It looks like you want to go. It looks like you’ve said all you want to. I’d ask you to take off your jacket, but I don’t see the point.’ I shouldn’t have made the crack about the jacket. And she says, ‘Yeah, okay then; see you around.’ And she lets herself out without another word. And that was that.

  “It was awful, Alicia.”

  “Well, in her defense, and I can’t believe I’m actually defending her, she wasn’t completely cowardly. She could have just sent you an e-mail or a text message or something.”

  “This isn’t about whether she had the guts to do it, though. If someone makes up their mind that they want to call things off, there’s nothing you can really do about that. But it didn’t make a lot of sense, you know? It was just so sudden and weird, the way she acted. And I like things to make sense. I like it when the facts fit a standard model. So I start thinking about it, and thinking about it—and I’m using the part of my brain for this that’s been trained to see patterns in data, the part of my brain that I ought to be using to do science. And I start to see some patterns in all this noise. And I don’t like them.”

  “What do you mean: patterns? Hold it. We need nachos. It’s important to keep the proportion of booze to fatty foods in your digestive system carefully balanced at a time like this. I’ll go up to the bar. Stay here.”

  Maybe Alicia actually was as understanding and empathetic as she claimed she was. She waited at the bar for the plate to come out from the kitchen, leaving Carson to himself for a little while. A guy next to her started to lean into her personal space, saying something that Carson couldn’t hear, probably a backhanded compliment meant to sting the mark into acquiescing to a later request for her digits. Alicia turned to him and spat out five quick syllables in response (though Carson couldn’t tell what they were, either). The guy stood, lifted his coat off his chair, and quietly removed to an empty seat at the other end of the bar, leaving his half-full glass of Guinness behind.

  A few minutes later Alicia came back to the table, managing to juggle two glasses of water and another shot of bourbon for Carson, along with a heaping plate of tortilla chips covered with mounds of ground beef and diced onions and black olives and shredded lettuce and sour cream and salsa, the whole concoction slathered with gobs of melted cheese. Carson lifted one of the chips and placed it in his mouth, wiping a searing rope of cheddar off his lip. “Good,” he said.

  He ate a few more nachos while Alicia watched. Then he sighed and said, “So then.”

  “So then,” said Alicia, pointing at the whiskey once again.

  “Hey, I’m a little bit drunk,” he said.

  “Correct. So then.”

  “So I had some people over for dinner the other night. Philip and his wife, Rebecca, and Kate was there. This was Kate’s idea, for me to have Philip and Rebecca over for dinner. She and Rebecca have been friends for…years, I guess.”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “And she—Kate—got really drunk. She wasn’t really watching her drinking: her glass was always two-thirds full, and she kept topping it off. And actually, the next morning she told me she didn’t remember a whole lot of what happened the night before. And to be honest, I didn’t believe her at first. She was kind of out of it toward the end of the night, and she threw up in my bathroom later on, but she didn’t seem blackout drunk, you know. But then I remembered the couple of times I blacked out from drinking in college, and my friends told me the next day they didn’t notice a thing. Though maybe I did something embarrassing and they were just sparing my feelings. Anyway, it’s hard to say.”

  “Continue,” Alicia said.

  “So I served this barbecue I make. And for this whole meal I went modernist—nothing too traditional. Showing off a little, maybe. So the courses might have seemed unusual to someone who wasn’t used to this sort of thing, and the servings were satisfying though not overly generous.”

  “I want you to make dinner for me,” Alicia said. “But continue.”

  “So when I brought out the barbecue from the kitchen, Kate—she had already had a couple of glasses of wine and a cocktail by then—well, I guess you could say she made fun of it. Lighthearted. But—except—well, I guess the subtext was that this wasn’t how real black people made barbecue. And she talked about it in this voice that was—well, it was like an imitation of the way you’d think black people talked if you’d never met a black person in real life, just seen them in movies.”

  “But she said later that she didn’t remember any of this.”

  “Right. And whether people are responsible when they’re sober for things they say and do when they’re drunk is a different issue. Let’s table that.”

  “Okay: tabled. Continue.”

  “So when I brought out dessert—and, okay, she was definitely three sheets to the wind by then—she makes this I guess joke about how watermelon would have gone better than what I served.”

  “Carson, I’ll go ahead and say it. In the back of your head—the part of your head that’s always looking for patterns in data—you’re thinking that a few too many drinks brought out the fact that deep down Kate, this woman you were into, is a little bit racist.”

  “I guess,” Carson said.

  “But I’m not even sure that’s the right word,” Carson said after he and Alicia silently finished the plate of nachos. He was not unaware of the favor she was doing for him, keeping him company in this way. She didn’t normally eat this kind of food at this time of night, or at all, really, since she claimed it wrecked her times when she went running the next morning. He couldn’t help but think that Alicia was acting as his shrink not out of empathy for its own sake, but so he’d get his head straight and get back to work. But still: maybe she was good with people, when she wanted to be.

  “Why don’t you think ‘racist’ is the right word?” Alicia said. “Because I think it is.”

  “Because it’s not like she was saying that the new science of phrenology had conclusively demonstrated the smaller brain of the Asiatic peoples, or something like that. But…and I see what you’re saying. Racism usually doesn’t do you the favor of making itself plain: you usually aren’t sure if it’s racism or not. Most of the time it’s there and gone before you can point at it. And maybe you’re just being paranoid, or overly sensitive. Like: maybe you misheard when the date your friend brought to the cocktail party casually mentioned that she envied Jews because they were so good with money. No one else at the party seemed to have noticed anything, right? Surely someone would have called her out if she’d said something so patently offensive in public, right? You must have misheard what she said. Or maybe you misheard the tone: maybe she was making the kind of joke where you say something really offensive in a public place, and it’s funny because no one—no one we know—would actually believe such a thing.”

  “You know what kind of people really like to make jokes like that? Racists.”

  “I know! But it’s not as easy as that. Is it? It’s not as easy to distinguish the out-and-out racist from the one who is and thinks she isn’t, or the one who actually isn’t but sometimes sounds like she is, if you misinterpret her. I mean…I don’t know. It’s really confusing.” Carson laughed nervously. “I mean, when she said that watermelon is a good finisher for a meal that has barbecue for a main course, it’s not like she’s wrong.”

  “I’ve heard enough,” Alicia said. “Now I will render advice. Are you prepared?”

  “I am prepared!” said Carson, slapping his open hand on the table.

  “Then here it is. Carson: history lives in the gap between the information and the truth. And each of us has no choice but to determine our own history, f
or ourselves. We don’t have perfect information here, because that’s not possible—we would have to know what was going on in Kate’s head, and whether you yourself are a reliable narrator. So the history is under-determined. There are several possible interpretations.

  “Let’s consider the set of possible histories in which you behaved honorably, but she nonetheless acted as she did. All but one of these are uninteresting, as far as we’re concerned. She is flighty; she is afraid of commitment; she is not in love with you; there is another, more suitable man, or she believes there soon will be; she wishes to die alone. All of these and many others are possible. What she says is not necessarily what she believes; what she believes is not necessarily what is true. But you can’t do anything about this. Your best course is to leave the matter alone. Don’t speculate on her motives and don’t pursue it further. Let it go.

  “This leaves the interesting version of events, and when I say ‘interesting,’ I mean this in an unfortunate way. This is the version where…okay, let’s not use the word ‘racist,’ though I do feel it’s the right one. Let’s say this: she grew up in a certain culture; she developed certain opinions. Even though we live in the twenty-first century, most of us are still children of the twentieth in one way or another, as much as we like to flatter ourselves by thinking otherwise.

  “Now, Kate likes to think of herself as a modern woman. But her twenty-first-century mind was trumped by her twentieth-century heart. The dissonance between the two…well, it caused problems. One night she said a few things that might have been interpreted as…untoward. The motives don’t really matter. The next day she felt ashamed and tried to lie her way out of it. Or she truly didn’t remember. Same difference, really. The point is: something made it apparent to her that this whole grand adventure wasn’t going to work out. Do we agree that this is the…interesting scenario? Can we say that this is a scenario that you would rather not believe is the case, but that you suspect is highly likely?”

  “That’s about right,” Carson said, his voice not much more than a whisper.

  “So here is the question. Given that the information you have is necessarily imperfect. Given that the history of events is necessarily under-determined. The history that you choose to believe will determine the person that you are. If only in a small way. You will be a person who chose to see the world one way instead of another. And that choice will color the way you see the world, and your future, and your image in a mirror. You will never be able to determine conclusively why she acted as she did. But you can determine what kind of person you want to be.

  “I can tell you this. That in the absence of perfect information, I choose to believe in the version of events that would occur in the best of all possible worlds. What that version of events is: that’s your decision. That’s up to you. I can’t decide that for you; I wouldn’t try.

  “That’s all I have to say.”

  “That was a long way around to tell me I’d be happier if I gave her the benefit of the doubt and dropped it,” Carson said, after a few moments of silence.

  “That’s not what I said,” Alicia replied.

  “And this ‘best of all possible worlds’ thing. I don’t know. I’m all for optimism, but it seems like in some circumstances, thinking like that would be a little naive.”

  “I’ve given you my advice,” Alicia said. “It might not work for you; you can take or leave it. It looks like they want us to clear out of here. Let me pick up the check.”

  Carson reached for his wallet and Alicia said firmly, “No.” He obediently placed his hand back on the table.

  It was half past one when they left the bar, and they took a short walk through downtown to let the alcohol clear from their heads. The air was crisp and called for jackets, and the moon hung low in the sky, pale and bright and full. The streets were nearly deserted, though on the sidewalk across from Carson and Alicia, a bar patron who’d been pulled over was trying to plead his way out of a DUI by pointing at the license plate of his autonomous car. “Sir,” he said. “Sir. I was not touching the wheel of this vehicle. I was not going to touch the wheel. This is like—this is like if you pulled over a taxi and handed a DUI to the passenger! C’mon: you can’t fucking do that! It’s ridiculous! I didn’t mean to say ‘fuck,’ officer.”

  “I feel a lot better about the whole thing now,” Carson said as they left the groveling driver behind them. “I’m not sure why. But I do.”

  “It was the whiskey,” Alicia said. “And the nachos.”

  “You’re underselling yourself.”

  “I never do that.”

  “Seriously—I appreciate you talking to me. Or forcing me to talk to you, I guess I should say.”

  “Thank you.”

  Behind them, they heard plaintive protests and the clink of handcuffs. “You gotta be kidding me with this shit!” the driver screamed. “Fucking kidding!”

  “You are one cool lady, Alicia Merrill,” Carson said.

  “This is true. Did you decide to take my advice?”

  “In a sense. You could say that.”

  “What did you finally decide? About Kate.”

  “I…I think I’d rather keep that to myself.”

  “That’s fair. But whatever you decide: let it go. Or the knowing and the not knowing will eat you up.”

  “I know. I will.”

  “We didn’t talk about you at all this evening,” Carson said as they reached their cars. “I did all the talking.”

  “That’s fine. I’m fine with that.”

  “How are you and Philip doing?” he asked, and immediately felt that he’d made a severe mistake.

  For once, Alicia would not meet his gaze. “We’re okay.”

  15

  TRUE ENOUGH

  There is nothing wrong with a glass of white wine with breakfast: it is one of the world’s rare and secret pleasures. Peppery scrambled eggs are nice with a good dry Riesling; Frosted Flakes pair well with Chardonnay. Besides, Rebecca was finding out more often lately that waiting out the clock until noon, the earliest socially permissible time to pour yourself a libation, was…well, it was unpleasant. When she woke up in the morning her brain felt half a size too large for her skull, and her head was full of whispers. But with that first sip of wine at twelve sharp she felt great: her mind got quiet and her mood evened out. There was no reason to wait until the sun reached an arbitrary point in the sky to feel normal.

  So there was no reason why she would expect Philip to make some sort of remark when she served him black coffee with his eggs and toast, and poured two percent milk for Sean with his half-size serving of same, and then placed the milk carton back in the fridge, retrieved the bottle of Chardonnay, poured herself a healthy glass, and put the bottle back. Philip and Rebecca didn’t talk much at breakfast anyway—she wasn’t much for morning conversation, because of the headache she usually had on waking (which wasn’t a hangover or anything like it, but just the kind of thing that happens to you when you get older), and Philip usually had a tablet in front of him displaying a PDF of an article in some science journal, highlighting significant passages with a fingertip. He glanced up at her, looked at the glass of wine, and looked at her again (and this is when the voice in the back of her head was actually screaming at him to, fuck, say something, not even in anger—just a slight harrumph of disapproval might have been enough to get her to pour the glass down the drain, to tough out the headache, to turn down the hair of the dog that bit her). Then he went back to his tablet, unnoticing, or having decided that noticing, and the consequent unpredictable conversation, would take too much work at a time when he needed his brain for other, grander purposes.

  She drank the glass with breakfast and poured herself another. By the time she’d gotten Sean off to school (second grade) the edges had been taken off her thoughts and the world seemed as it should be: not too real, but real enough.

  If the marriage into which the two of them had settled was not the most communicative, they both had
the projects of their lives to occupy them: Rebecca had their son, and Philip had the causality violation device.

  After a couple of years of wandering in the wilderness, spending more time applying for grants to keep himself afloat than he did on research, Philip suspected that he might have finally found a reliable source of funding for his work. They’d reached out to him first—a division of the Department of Defense that had been spun off from DARPA a few years ago and that, even if it wasn’t exactly a secret, preferred to cultivate a strong aura of secrecy about itself, now that the parent organization once nicknamed “darkest DARPA” had become common knowledge and therefore mundane. In its place, DAPAS began to play the role of the government’s all-seeing apparatus that could not itself be seen, as DARPA and the now even less mysterious NSA had before it. (When the DAPAS representative had called Philip on his personal phone—nice touch there—and Philip had asked who he had the pleasure of speaking with, the gravelly voice on the other end had said, after a suitably dramatic pause, “You may refer to me as Mr. Cheever.” It turned out that this was because his name actually was Mr. Cheever, Mr. Michael Cheever. Born and raised in Baltimore, a die-hard Orioles fan.) Mr. Cheever had, he said, “become aware” of Philip’s research (most likely through reading some or all of the published papers he’d authored) and had also found out about his funding difficulties (which wouldn’t have been much harder—the community of physicists whose work was related to causality violation was small and tightly knit, and a conversation over a couple of beers with any one of its members would get you the dope on them all). Mr. Cheever gave it to be understood that his superiors (the sort of people who sat behind clean desks in dimly lit rooms, their faces veiled in shadow) felt that the project showed “significant potential,” and that they wondered, with a curiosity that possessed the force of command, if Philip would be willing to come down to DC on their dime to make an informal presentation on his work—something with lots of slides that would last about an hour.