Come With Me

by Helen Schulman

  Theo was a lunch recess kid, not a lunch club kid. What did quiet time mean for a kid like Theo?

  “Check in with your wife and let me know if next Thursday works,” said Ms. Zhang. She pressed a pink sticky note into Dad’s hand. “Maximus’s home number. Julie and Chris Powell. Perhaps Theo can make an apology himself.”

  His dad had nodded. Then he’d started to say something. Then he’d stopped.

  Ms. Zhang raised an eyebrow.

  “That kid has been bullying my son and his friend all year,” Dad said, running a hand through his thick gray hair. “You’d think in this community . . . With the losses that we’ve had . . . Everyone talks about the pressure on the high school students. And rightly so. Because we’re in the middle of an epidemic . . . But what about the pressure on these little kids? You know, when does that kind of self-esteem problem start? I know Theo. He was looking out for Blossom.”

  “Ramming his head into Max’s pelvis didn’t help Blossom, Mr. Messinger,” said Ms. Zhang in a principal’s voice. And then more quietly, “Are you suggesting that you are worried about self-harm? I don’t see that myself, but we could arrange for Theo to talk with someone.”

  “No,” said Dad. “Absolutely not. I just think it’s unhealthy for him to be treated this way.”

  “As long as you’re not concerned.”

  “I’m not,” said Dad.

  Ms. Zhang nodded her head. “Okay then. Right now we’re discussing how Theo treated Maximus. I assure you I will be speaking with Maximus’s parents later about how Maximus treats Theo.”

  His dad was tall and handsome, and usually people didn’t speak to him that way, even lately, when he bent over more, and his tummy curved out. But though Ms. Zhang was kind, she also meant business. (Theo was mind-quoting his mother, that’s what she often said.)

  “Theo had several other choices, including the best one, speaking with a lunch recess monitor.”

  Even Theo knew it was time to go home then. They said their good-byes politely, and he and his dad walked out of the building and into the yard and then down the back path and out of the school gate in front of SCRA, the faculty and staff sports club where the Stanford kids who lived on campus got to swim after school and he and Miles did not.

  Jack had had swim team meets there before he joined the water polo team at Paly. Theo and Miles had gone sometimes with their mom to cheer Jack on. Jack didn’t want them to come, now that he was in high school, but sometimes he let Mom just so she could video the meet for Lily. Dad had usually been at work. Now he mostly stayed at home. It was funny, like now, when Dad was the one to show up. He’d not been the one before.

  “I wish you could teach me how to be your father,” Dad said again as they crossed the parking lot and headed for Stanford Avenue. They were only a few blocks away from home.

  Theo was quiet. He didn’t know that dads needed teaching to be dads. He pressed his cheek against his dad’s hand as they walked and his dad reached over and ruffled Theo’s hair with his other hand, the one with the gold ring and the watch his mom had bought his dad a long time ago, when he turned forty.

  * * *

  After they’d finally arrived at i.e., Donny spent all his time in the back office he shared with Adnan, pretty much ignoring Amy, as usual. It was hard to figure out what he’d wanted from her that morning, something was percolating, or maybe he just missed his mommy . . . And Amy was the next best thing. Who knew, who cared? Amy needed energy to start this next round of her day. Out front, in the open workspace, where she sat, she had her own desk. “Age before beauty,” she’d said when she’d claimed it, and nobody had laughed or told her what a rocking body she had for her age, even though in her own humble opinion she still looked pretty good. Didn’t they know she needed to hear it?

  Naresh had his own desk, too, and he was twirling endlessly in his ergonomic chair as he talked on the phone, like he was on the autism spectrum—although Amy didn’t think he was. Maybe it was a sensory-integration issue with Naresh. Theo had those; when he was small they’d had to brush him all over his body with a little soft corn silk brush in order to calm him down. There were probably a ton of sensory issues in their office—hence the massage chair in the corner, the extra earbuds in the supply closet, and the stacks of chewing gum in the pantry.

  Around one o’clock burritos wrapped in foil were tossed like fat silver zeppelins between the couches. At two o’clock, Twizzlers were eaten. Someone made an Izzy’s Bagels run at four; Donny always ordered the same thing, a chocolate chip bagel with jalapeño cream cheese, and he never barfed. He had bragged about this at their last party (which just meant staying later at work than usual on a Friday, with beer), and then again today.

  “I’ve never barfed in my whole life,” bragged Donny, chomping on his bagel.

  Adnan hooted. He said, “And I’ve never farted.”

  Donny just returned to his office.

  “Tell us another one, Don-Key,” Adnan called after him. Then Adnan went mountain biking.

  Some of the staff, sick of coding, searched out the likelihood of Donny’s nonbarfing online and then unsatisfied, still arguing his veracity, posted the debate on Quora.

  Donny and Adnan’s private office lay behind a one-way mirror: a joke from all the years when psychologists had observed Donny as a little kid. Esmeralda Sanchez—a rarity on staff, a female and a freshman—pretended to stick her finger down her throat and made gagging motions while staring at her own reflection, seemingly forgetting that Donny could be monitoring her every move.

  Amy herself had slipped up often enough, glimpsing the back hem of her skirt to see if the Scotch tape still held or fluffing her hair in the glass, forgetting he was back there. The man behind the curtain.

  The beauty of Invisible E-nk was that it was conceptually iterative and flexible. In production terms, it lent itself to elegance—they were using Pylon and Comet for the back end and Ubuntu Linux for its operating system. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud would host the servers—this was all vintage Naresh. And unlike Snapchat, it truly left no Internet shadow. The coders were working simultaneously on Invisible Pix and now, Inaudible Voicemail, both of which would exist solely as mobile apps but could be easily adapted to AirPods and neural lace when the technology became available, “because computers are so ten years ago,” Adnan drawled, “and phones are fucking clunky,” making fun of himself and nearly everyone else on the planet.

  All these services needed government clearance and tracking ability without raising privacy issues—so they outsourced legal.

  Most of Amy’s day was spent planting items in the Valley blogs, refining ideas for a company website (which proved difficult because the general concept was so constantly fluctuating, but necessary still if she were ever going to create intrinsic SEO). She also was attempting to drum up some dead-tree interest in the business sections of the remaining papers. She hounded the folks at Help a Reporter Out and Techcrunch.com, fingers crossed, hoping to enter the company into their databases. Billboards were her newest pet project. Traffic was awful these days. Road rage was mitigated by off-road entertainment. What if she had some doofy visuals of Donny and some of the upperclassmen with their youthful dad bods in their underwear up along the highway with just the company’s tag underneath them? The goal was to get this company sold, right? She needed to increase their visibility. She had a meeting set up with Naresh and an outside advertising agency before she floated this one by Donny.

  Part of Amy’s campaign was ensuring that invisibility wasn’t perceived as a code name for illegality, but rather as a means of discretion, although privacy as a concept seemed in and out of vogue these days—it was her job to track this, too. In one pitch she’d sent this morning she’d quoted Edward Snowden: I don’t want to live in a world where there’s no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity. In fifty-three seconds, the editor at TechCrunch had shot back: “‘You already have zero privacy—get over it,’ Scott McNe
aly, 1999!!!”

  They had lived together so long, Amy sounded in her own head like Dan, but wasn’t the exchange apples and oranges, like art and commerce? Not that Snowden was literally an artist, but sort of, as he was a whistleblower and/or a traitor and there was an art to all that tightrope walking. McNealy had founded Sun Microsystems in the early ’80s, so wasn’t he just an out-of-touch relic of the dot .com era? At sixty-something, McNealy represented realism, but maybe not his generation, who mostly seemed befuddled, and time after time reliably surprised by issues of confidentiality and discretion no matter how many times they’d previously faced them. (Carlos Danger? Amy Pascal? John Podesta?) Under-thirties didn’t seem to give a shit about privacy; under-eighteens ironically did.

  “Privacy as a concept is a whole lot like tattoos,” Jack said recently. It was a Friday night a couple of months prior, just a few weeks after Lily’s last visit. They were in the midst of what Jack called a “three way” over dinner, Lily Skyping in on Jack’s computer, Amy picking their fertile zeitgeisty brains.

  “Tell the truth to your old ma,” said Amy. “Are we Invisible E-nkers just barking up the wrong tree?”

  “Isn’t Donny a genius?” Lily asked politely.

  Sometimes she looked even prettier on the screen than the way Amy remembered her. Maybe every day her prettiness was increasing. As they spoke Lily rolled her long blond hair up into a twist, where it miraculously stayed, pin-less and perfect, resting in the nape of her swanlike neck. For a moment, Amy flashed back to her eldest brother’s girlfriend from high school, Elodie. She’d had hair like that. The kind most white girls wanted.

  Jack said, “Personally, I live on a flexitarian diet of Twitter and text, but I’m actively searching for the next best thing. What’s cool about your start-up is how retro it is.”

  “What do you mean, baby?” asked Lily.

  Lily called Amy’s seventeen-year-old son baby. Right on the screen in front of her. Amy had ruled out the phone at the table, because if Jack was on the phone with Lily, even just texting, it didn’t matter if he was there at the dinner table or not. He was away, away, with her, in cyber heaven; lovebirds in the cloud, up in their own little hot-air balloon. So, Amy said nothing but chewed at her salad. She’d bought some fresh goat cheese sprinkled with lavender at the Sunday California Avenue farmers’ market about two weeks before and she’d forgotten about it. It had dried out quite a bit, so now she’d crumbled some on top of her greens, applied sea salt, and pronounced it feta.

  Dan and the Things had eaten earlier. Their dishes were still in the sink to prove it. When she’d gotten home from work Amy had made a boy salad (iceberg lettuce, refried beans, sliced steak, shredded Pepper Jack, tortilla strips, and salsa fresca) and some grilled-cheese sandwiches for Jack—he’d had a team practice that evening. For herself, she’d tossed what was left in her crisper, all glorious fresh California produce, fresh at purchase at least, now freshly wilted but still better than anything she could have procured at the local Safeway. She also poured herself a small mason jar full of Chardonnay from Sonoma.

  Seventeen hundred miles and just three states away, Lily picked at her yogurt and fruit. She was a bony thing. She sat cross-legged on a kitchen stool, her hip bones jutting out of the waistband of her short white shorts, her crop top revealing a sunken waistline. Amy found herself always encouraging Lily to eat.

  “Lily, sweetie, I texted your mom with that link to the almond butter you liked so much when you were out here. I asked the guys at the stand if they did mail order and they do. Why don’t you spread a little of what you have left on a piece of toast? For protein.”

  “Thanks, Amy, but I ate the most ginormous lunch. I have a food belly!” She puffed hers out as far as it could possibly go, which was not much.

  “I think all the douches on Facebook are just a bunch of posers,” said Jack, the only one still in the conversation. “They lie all the time, all that fake happy-image shit and bragging.”

  Lily said, “The most subversive thing you can do in eleventh grade in Dallas is not be on Facebook.”

  “So, subversive is still a good thing,” said Amy, as a hybrid of a statement and a question. She took a sip of her white wine.

  “Facebook’s so old school. Herd mentality. Like ink,” said Jack. “Now sleeve tats are prerecs for baristas, and tramp stamps for chicks that teach kindergarten.”

  “Interesting,” said Amy. She forked up one of his cheesy crusts and took a bite. Then she started picking at his tortilla strips. When he was little, whenever she took Jack and his best friend, Kevin Choi, out for burgers after swimming, she’d say, “I’m going to teach you boys a trick about dating for when you’re older; now act like you don’t notice,” and then she’d steal french fries off their plates. First the boys squealed in protest, but eventually they just rolled their eyes when she’d swoop in. Kevin was such a sweet kid; since both boys made the water polo team at Paly freshman year, whenever they were out celebrating a win, he’d push her the little cardboard carton of fries as soon as it hit the table, before even taking a single bite himself. Mission accomplished! Amy prided herself on a job well done in the mothering-of-sons department. But she’d never counted on a Lily, who seemed to live on air, contentedly.

  That same weekend, Amy re-upped the conversation. Jack had actually deigned to go running with her, on a rainy day at Corte de Madera Creek, an hour’s drive away, after she’d promised a strawberry pancake breakfast at the Farmhouse Local. They chose a single-file trail through velvety deep wilderness, fecund and foresty, dull emerald treetops and rust-colored tree trunks, some fancy footwork around the ruts and roots that Runner’s World deemed good for strengthening the ankles, Jack taking the lead. There was something about the absence of eye contact, like when he was a little boy sitting in the backseat and they’d already dropped the other kids off after car pool, which was magic for communication. They were so gloriously alone then. She could get a wealth of info out of him, glancing at him surreptitiously in her rearview mirror. Those dreamy green eyes.

  “The Internet should be very IRL,” Jack said as they ran, his words flying back over his left shoulder on the wings of a thick, wet breeze. Redwood scent was sort of mossy; it flavored the air woody, verdant, like sweet rot plus mud. Also, there was a hint of pine. As she ran Amy inhaled so deeply she’d breathed Jack’s words in, too, translating them with her exhalations, an exchange of carbon dioxide and meaning. Jack was saying that life online should be like life in life, she thought, one foot pounding the trail after another, which conceptually was both very radical and forward thinking, or she’d given birth to a poet or a Luddite. (If the Internet should be like life, then why bother with the Internet at all? It was a pain in the ass, sometimes.)

  “Time in cyberspace should exist like it does on planet earth,” Jack said. “Take the space out of it, and you’ll finally have something new.”

  Finally? New? Wasn’t it all new, too new for new words to capture how new it actually was? Isn’t that what Donny had been saying in his own geeky way? And wasn’t Jack really talking about something old, how it always had been before, just now mechanized through state-of-the-art instruments—a sort of time substantiation? Jack, Jack, Jack, she’d wanted to say, defying time seems to be a major point of the Internet—erasing its erosion and obfuscations, the fact that up until now everything had always ended.

  But instead, she’d listened that Saturday morning in Corte Madera. Amy liked to hear Jack talk. She liked almost everything about Jack; she didn’t even mind when his sweat flew back in her face. It mixed with the light mist of rain.

  Amy thought about this now, in the office, not in a state of bliss, but in one of mild irritation. It was late afternoon already, she was tired, and Donny had just sent a link to some new article to the whole team. It was from the Washington Post, TECH TITANS DEFYING DEATH. Amy’s eyes skimmed over the piece; those guys weren’t discussing corporate failure, but were literally intent on curing human mor
tality. Hmmm, she thought, that’s certainly ahead of the curve. Talk about “breaking stuff.” She remembered explaining death to Jack when he was just a little kid. “Why hasn’t anybody done anything about this?” he’d asked in outrage. Now, apparently, they had.

  Donny could have just stood in the door to his private sanctum and told them all about the piece, but he’d messaged a link and a directive instead. One could argue, he’d delayed relaying the info, because it would have been more attention grabbing to have a person actually stand up and say “read this” than to add another post to everyone’s endless beta channel. But by using Slack, Donny transmitted info that they could access again and again, the very evidence that by definition i.e. was designed to erase.

  The article was about living forever, (a) by ingesting microscopic nanobots that continually repair the host organism; or (b) by downloading the human brain into a robot body. The article quoted V.C. Peter Thiel: “I believe that evolution is a true account of nature. But I think we should try to escape it or transcend it in our society.” The shared article could indeed exist for eternity; even if it was deleted, it was infinitely recoverable. Having invented forever, these tech titans now thought they themselves could also live forever by using the tools of their trade, “on the most complicated piece of machinery in existence: the human body.” That was also a quote. When she was in college and studied literature, it was male novelists who’d believed they could use their craft to achieve immortality. Updike, Mailer, Bellow. They’d behaved as if the written word could defy death, but clearly it, um, had not. They hadn’t even survived the “Jack test”: he’d never heard of any of them.

  Most of the people quoted in the Post’s article were around Amy’s age, mature enough to remember those dead old literary codgers, but also getting on enough for the idea of mortality to scare the living shit out of them. Strategically, middle-aged people were also Invisible’s primary target. Maybe part of Donny’s plan? Who knew? Who ever knew with Donny? For example, the service was perfect for someone who hoped to hook up with an ex-boyfriend from summer camp, but cared about not getting caught. Invisible Pix was for high school students “who acted like they were in junior high,” said Adnan. And rapist athletes, Amy thought.